#i’ve read the main books and like half of the first comic series

[klazje]

rereading the high republic 😁😁😁

[shitpostingperidot]

Kamala Khan’s bookshelves

Kamala’s room in The Marvels is an absolute treasure trove of little details to zoom in on, and I’ve identified so many books on her shelves!

Shelf 1, top to bottom:

1. Landmark Experiments in Twentieth Century Physics by George L. Trigg

College-level book about experiments that helped us learn about x-rays, lasers, isotopes, superconductors, and all kinds of other things I don’t understand. Meant to be more practical than theoretical since it talks about the actual methodologies of these experiments. Could be for school, or for Kamala and Bruno to run their own tests of Kamala’s powers. The first of many books in the Khan house that come from Dover Publications.

2. Space Time Matter by Hermann Weyl

“An esoteric initiation into space time physics” -Amazon reviewer. I’m gonna be real, I don’t understand half the words in this book description, but apparently it’s famous for introducing gauge theory, which was later reborn as phase transformations in quantum theory. I can see this being something Kamala reads to try and understand the bangle transporting her to the Partition. Also from Dover.

3. A Map to the Sun by Sloane Leong

A graphic novel about a high school girl’s basketball team learning to work together despite their many differences and conflicts. Also it has a gorgeous color palette. Seems fairly self explanatory why it’s in this movie. I’ll definitely be borrowing this from my library! Like my friend Kamala recommended a book to me herself.

4. The Good Immigrant anthology edited by Nikesh Shukla

21 essays from Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people in the UK about their experiences. It was crowdfunded initially, extremely critically acclaimed, and has gotten spinoffs and sequels. Riz Ahmed, who is British Pakistani, is one contributor, and a fun fact is that Rish Shah (Kamran from Ms. Marvel) worked with Riz Ahmed in an Oscar winning short called The Long Goodbye. Also, the editor, Nikesh Shukla, is currently writing the Spider-Man India comics series!

5. Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam

A coming-of-age story about 3 young adults with complicated family, friend, and romantic relationships between them. They have to travel from Brooklyn to Bangladesh together one summer and thereby discover a lot about themselves. I haven’t read it, but there seems to be a ton of complex representation of LGBTQ, POC, immigrant, and Muslim characters. I wonder how much the three main characters can be compared with our three characters with complex relationships in The Marvels, and I wonder which character Kamala most relates to!

6. I can’t tell! The font is bugging the hell out of me because theoretically, with that amount of contrast, I should be able to read a word when I get two inches from the TV and mess with the settings. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

7. I also can’t tell, but I’m being easier on myself because the title is written in white on a yellow background. It’s not the only book I know off the top of my head with this color scheme (Yellowface by RF Kuang) because the title is definitely multiple words. Help!

Shelf 2, right to left:

1. One Night that Changes Everything by Lauren Barnholdt

A YA romance where, through a convoluted series of events, a teenager must face all of her insecurities in one night. I can see Kamala devouring this as brain candy after wrestling with those advanced science books, or using it as fic inspiration!

2. Can’t tell, but love the color scheme!

This next one is a weird one, because I am 100% sure of what book it is, but I cannot find a picture of a matching edition.

3. Wizard at Large by Terry Brooks

It’s definitely, without a doubt, this book (where a character and a magical medallion are accidentally transported to Earth from another realm and switches places with an evil genie). Like those are the words on the spine and the plot of the book is an obvious choice for this movie. The fonts match on the audiobook, the ebook, and the next two books in the series. But try as I might, I cannot find any proof on the internet that the physical book that appears in Kamala’s room, that uses those two fonts and that spine formatting, exists. This is haunting me…

4. (On the other side of the box) It’s not The Twilight Saga Eclipse, but I definitely thought it was before I could watch in high definition. I think it’s a journal or sketchbook of Kamala’s; there are a bunch scattered throughout the room.

Shelf 3:

I’ve only identified the bottom book, which is Einstein’s Theory of Relativity by Max Born (Dover Publications). The third one up is HAUNTING me, it looks SO identifiable and yet!

Living Room Side Table:

1. Amateur Astronomer’s Handbook by JB Sidgwick (from Dover Publications)

2. Cosmology by Hermann Bondi (also Dover)

Both of these seem less difficult than the science books in Kamala’s room, but reviewers note that it helps to know calculus when reading Cosmology. Idk which member of the Khan family is reading these, but I love their family’s connection to the stars 💫

Tbh I’m having so much fun doing this! And I really wish we got to see Monica’s living space so I can analyze her books 😭

[spiderpussinc]

I don’t think it’s very fair for you to try and knock others from reading Miguel’s OG run because truthfully that’s the only place you’re going to get his full character since every run after that is just “Let’s place him in different time scenarios to fix other people’s problems”. I’ve read ur reasonings and some of the issues I just don’t see and that’s coming from someone who’s ALSO half Hispanic and had similar family experiences. Idk I guess comic Miguel is rlly important and relatable to me and you shouldn’t turn others away from having that potential connection too. :/

NAH LOL it is *not* the only place to get his character truthfully -- his character is not consistent between runs, or between comic and movie! Not even Pdavid's runs have an unified version of Miguel since he just becomes an author self-insert after one point. The way Pdavid writes '92 Miguel - Gabriel is also shamelessly almost the same as he wrote Bruce Banner - Rick Jones. (another series where he ended up being pushed off the book after he started making really weird decisions; and notice these last two are white guys, which is how pdavid depicts Miguel all the time.)

I haven't even told people to not read them. In multiple posts i say 'read the first ones to see how it is, stop when you get annoyed, look up summaries, don't feel obligated to treat it as canon because it isn't.' If anyone feels threatened by this they should examine where that defensiveness is coming from.

I'm gonna be real with you that's like saying "the only way to REALLY understand Miles Morales is to read his ultimates run." You know, the one where his mother gets eaten alive by Venom, his dad thinks he's at fault for killing her and nearly beats him with a cane, where the closest thing he has to peter is a clone named jessica drew, and that eventually gets completely retconned in a universe explosion so main universe Miles can be rewritten. Do you remember seeing any of the things above in ITSV? Would you call them *the only real way to fundamentally understand Miles as a character?*

I keep seeing the rhetoric that 'real fans' have to subscribe to the very first script of these characters and that somehow enjoying their ATSV versions is fake-stanning and that is just... not true. That's not how comics work. Our most iconic, definitive, memorable traits for MANY of these superheroes have come from subsequent comic runs, rewrites, feats of adaptation and the interaction between fanwork-becoming-canon. Even uncle Ben's 'power and responsibility' schtick is NOT an original part of Peter's first draft. That came from re-imaginings and rewrites.

I'm really, truly not a fan of the argument that 'relating to parts of a character' completely absolves the text from criticism. It's not a good comic. It barely tries to be latino rep and frankly, I'm not going to praise it for just placing a label on him and doing nothing with it. I don't care for this white man's truth. It's racist and creepy and I should be paid reparations for having to read a storyline where the same girl gets paired up with two different brothers and then their father just to end up getting killed for a sexier token love interest. I am constantly frustrated by the argument that new fans should be forced to read it and potentially get turned away from comics forever; it's one of the worst offerings you could give them. 90's Marvel and DC are a public fandom joke and nearly led the market into bankruptcy!!!!! (Marvel filled for loss in 1996. IT WAS BAD. That's part of why the whole 2099 line went up in flames! The money was going down the drain.)

I've been a comic reader for a long time and I just can't give them blissful innocence passes like that. The current editor-in-chief at Marvel did yellowface and pretended to be a japanese man for years to write some shitty superhero weeb comics with no accountability whatsoever. He still has a job. RUNNING the company!

And here's the thing: I like Miguel too. I have a shitty family and I empathize with that but I KNOW he deserves much better than to be confined by white people's scripts and fetishes. I *want* him to have a chance, multiple chances even, to be completely rewritten and remolded by latine voices without the need for them to constantly refer or tie back into that white man's work; It is our right just as any other.

ATSV throws away most of Miguel's baggage, and straight up refuses to refer to the weird indepth sludge pdavid had going on; the artbook doesn't mention these first comics or most of his runs, they actually talk about other groundbreaking sci-fi concept work and the idea of basically rebuilding the landscape from scratch, and I am deeply thankful they do that. One of the biggest themes of the movie *is* that the idea of comic canon is fraught and full of holes, and that we should subvert it into joyful and honest expressions of these characters' cultures. These are movies that begin with the Comics Code Authority stamp, a censorship marker that among other things explicitly prohibited the positive depiction of pro-civil rights narratives and homosexual relationships, and actively turned their nose at protagonist black characters — & proceed to rip it to shreds. That's what we should be doing!

[oraclebabsday]

um hello!! im very new to comics, but of the characters I’ve seen so far, I really like Barbara and I was just wondering if you had any comic recommendations on where to start..? its very confusing trying to get into it all, but I’d like to be able to hold a conversation about someone I find interesting with my boyfriend so I can hear him info dump on me more cus he’s deep into dc so :)

Hi!!! That is so sweet omg 😭 Welcome to the weird wonderful world of comics!!! and also i’m so sorry for what I’m abt to throw at you lmao

Since you’ve sent this ask into an Oracle-centric blog, I’m gonna keep this rec list Oracle!Babs-centric (& also encourage my fellow mods to add on if they also have some recs!) I actually don’t have a whole lot of recs for Batgirl!Babs anyways, but I’ll be tagging my gen dc blog at the end in case you’d like to talk abt those or any other characters!

Also before I get Into the recs, I wanna give you some words of encouragement: there’s no right or wrong way to read! You’re also likely gonna have some well a lot of confusion at the beginning, esp bc there will be Events™️ that have ramifications™️ and you’re not always given full context of what’s come before or what’s happening concurrently with what you’re reading. I’ve been doing this for awhile and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that the more that you read & explore, the more fun you’ll have & the more things will usually start to make sense! But it’s all gotta start somewhere first! :D and you’ve def chosen a great character to be your launching point!

Im gonna be hopping around a bit in my recs here but I’ll try to keep it mostly in chronological order. That said, first up:

Suicide Squad (1987) - she appeared semi-regularly starting in #23! This was also her debut as Oracle! I really enjoyed the overall run & would normally highly recommend it, but also want to warn that it’s a pretty heavy read in terms of content itself (canon-typical violence ofc esp for a SuiSq comic, discussions of suicide ideation, period typical stereotyping/‘subversion’ of said stereotypes, but that’s a deeper discussion for a different blog) For that reason, I don’t necessarily recommend it for a first-time reader, esp if you’re wanting to solely focus on Babs. Team books usually aren’t super great when you’re reading for an individual character, in my experience, esp in a case like this where the character isn’t always necessarily part of the team or appears sporadically enough to disrupt the flow of following a storyline.

Birds of Prey (1999) - This team book breaks that prev rule tho, bc Babs is the leader & is in Damn near every issue of this run 😂 There’s several smaller team-ups before the main ‘99 run (BoP:Manhunt, BoP:Wolves, etc), which are also good as a prelude before the main run itself. This will be the longest thing that will give you a LOT to parse through & ymmv with a lot of it. (Dixon & Simone are the most prominent writers for it & without getting Into It they each have their Issues™️ & Crimes™️) It also crosses over with a few events/references others. Imo it’s a good window into what comics are like overall, esp when you get into a longer run with multiple writers at the helm. But it has an added bonus of keeping a pretty small cast at its forefront (for about half the run, it’s solely Babs n Dinah!) It also has a follow-up run in 2010 which is broken up by-

Oracle: The Cure - (technically a 3-issue mini-series but!!!) this one’s a culmination of Oracle & Calculator’s (it’s not rivalry? That can’t be the right word… Uhhh, nemesis-sitch?) from BoP & leads right into bringing Babs back to Gotham in Steph’s Batgirl run as well as the next BoP run I mentioned just a sec ago. It’s what I like to call connective (t)issues lol. Ymmv I think depending on if you’ve read BoP ‘99/TT ‘03 beforehand, but I hadn’t read a lot of TT before reading it at the time, and I enjoyed it a lot!

A couple individual issues I wanna suggest:

Batman Chronicles #5 - Oracle: Year One!!!!! Cannot rec this one enough!!! In lieu of reading Killing Joke (which really only serves Bruce, Joker, Jim Gordon’s characters) read this!!! LICHERALLY her origin in coming into her own as Oracle!!! This one is THE place to start, actually, before you read anything start here 😂

Batman: Gotham Knights #6 - okay, this one is admittedly a self-indulgent rec. Without spoiling the plot, it’s CLASSIC soap-opera level shit. The TENSION at play & the layers of Bruce & Babs dynamic, the messiness of the batfam!!! 👌 *chefs kiss* GK as a run in general too was a LOT of fun for me & Babs is a pretty prominent player in much of it, but this issue rlly takes the cake for me ngl

And to tie it all together for an extra couple of Important Event recs that you’ll run into esp if you pick up BoP first:

Batman: No Man’s Land - okay, this event was a Behemoth. It’s a LOT to read, but it is REALLY good imo as a launching point for where Bat-comics were at the start of the millennium. Babs takes the narrative role SO many times throughout & she rlly comes into her own by becoming a linchpin for the info system she builds for the batfam. Again, I don’t wanna discourage you when I say it’s a Long read, bc it’s well worth it imo, but also 100% okay to skip when you’re just starting out! It’s a big time sink!

Batman: Officer Down - okay put away the meme forJUST A SEC, our old friend Jim Gordon’s been shot & it’s up to Batma- oh wait bruce sulks by Jim’s bedside while Babs rallies the troops and GETS SHIT DONE to find who shot her dad? INTERESTING 🧐 In all seriousness tho, & compared to NML, this is a much easier bite-sized event that can give you a taste of what Event/crossoverComics™️ are generally like 👍

Bruce Wayne: Murderer?/Fugitive - okay so, take that same energy of the batfam having to Put In The Work to help Bruce out & flip it around bc now Bruce is the Main Suspect. The drama, the Intrigue™️. Pretty much everyone in the fam gets a moment to shine & this is def peak of how Babs fits into the fam during this era. This one runs a bit on the longer side & babs is again, more of a support role here, but god damn I loved it a lot!

I feel like I’m obligated to at least Mention Batman: War Games, mostly to note that it finally shakes the foundation of Oracle being the batfam’s main support (her CLOCKTOWER gets nerfed in this event 😭) If you read all of BoP and skip over this event & then are confused abt why Babs is suddenly being ejected from Gotham, just remember that her clocktower gets blown up, Steph dies, Bruce n Babs have a falling out & that’s basically why Babs starts flying around the country & settles in Metropolis for a bit instead of going back to Gotham. I reread this event at least once a year bc it gave me brainworms, I can not in good conscience recommend it to anyone bc no one understands her (War Games) like i do 💕 Godspeed if you decide to read it o7

Other recs/mentions:

Batgirl (2000) - okay if you end up reading NML, you’ll be introduced to Cass in it, & this run picks up with her. Babs is in it a LOT at the beginning as supporting cast to Cass (up to War Games ofc, but I won’t say much more abt that lol) I’m ngl, when I was trying to get more into comics, this run was what HOOKED me

Batgirl (2009) - so in a similar vein, Babs also features as a support for Steph too in her batgirl run. It’s… different from Cass’ run, but I also rlly love this one too. And also am forever bitter that the Batgirls run didn’t realize their potential BUT WE’RE NOT GETTING INTO THAT HERE.

Gonna mention Batman: Gotham Knights one more time bc again, while Babs isn’t a main focus, I think it’s rlly good at tying the batfam together during that era & giving a reader glimpses into other characters/dynamics. I think I got more out of it after I had read a few other runs from this time period (namely Robin, Azrael & some prominent stuff with Huntress), but can also see it as a potential launching point for new readers too 👍 if you wanna get more into the batfam/Batman but are intimidated by the Big Runs, this can potentially be a good bridge!

Gonna rapid fire mention that Babs as Oracle has a lot of appearances in Robin (93), Nightwing (96), JLA (96), Azrael (95) and obvsly Batman/Detective Comics from the 90s into 00s. I’ve read a few of these runs, and ymmv depending on how attached you may get to certain characters. But that’s what comics is all about! Getting attached and exploring other characters n teams n stuff!

A Gen note that I wanna end on: I wasn’t exaggerating when I said earlier abt how the more you read the more you’ll have fun. I can’t even begin to count the number of times that I’ve read something from a 90s/00s comic & was essentially jumpscared by a sudden Oracle cameo that I wasn’t expecting! She pops up in so many things throughout the universe at the time!!! She was THE info broker for all the supers!!! It makes me so insane that DC threw that all away to magi-cure her and demote her back to batgirl when she had grown so much 😭

anyways I hope you have fun!!! And again if you’re ever looking for other recs my more Gen dc blog is @dyketectivecomics! If my fellow mods or anyone else have some recs to add or to dispute haha, I’ll be tagging this so others can see/rb/reply to add their recs too 👍

Okay! \o/ that’s all I got for now! Happy reading anon!!!!

[alexistalkscomics]

Ultimate Spider-Man #10: A Bit of Deja Vu?

Because of the mismanagement of both the comic book distribution system and the British postal system, I’ve only been able to catch up on Ultimate Spider-Man and read the latest issue today.

Written by regular writer Jonathan Hickman and guest artist, David Messina, this issue puts Peter and his exploits as Spider-Man on the back burner and instead, focuses on what Ben and Jonah have been getting up to at The Paper as they investigate Wilson Fisk and his presumed connection Stane/Stark Industries and recent events in New York until learning that it is actually Oscorp that purchased Stane/Stark’s assets.

This portion of the duo’s investigation is largely what takes up the content of the first half of the issue and I have to say that I didn’t find it terribly exciting, even with the added drama of Oscorp being one of the main investors for The Paper becuase as a reader, I’ve been fully aware that it was Oscorp who took over Stane/Stark for a few issues now so everything just ends up feeling like more of a recap of what I already know rather than an actual standalone story which feel like Hickman falling into the trap of focusing a bit too much on plot to the detriment of the story which is something that he occasionally has a tendency to do in some of his more recent Marvel work.

The issue only really becomes interesting near the end as we see Harry Osborn who in the new Ultimate Universe, is an anti-heroic version of the Green Goblin confront Ben and Jonah to try and get them to drop their investigation.

It’s one of the more interesting moments in the issue as it’s gives us a bit more of an insight into how this version of Harry ticks, especially when Peter isn’t around and he isn’t able to just blow things up like he can as Green Goblin. Even though this Harry is still far more stable than most versions of the character and is still a long way from becoming the iconic villainous incarnation of The Gobln, Hickman does a good job of planting the seeds for some of Harry’s darker traits here.

This scene is also where the most interesting development of the issue occurs where Harry gives Ben and Jonah a flash drive containing information about the true nature of Earth 6160 and its history.

This represents a very major turning point in the ongoing storyline of the Ultimate Universe and whilst I do have some concerns that this development has happened a bit too quickly and could interfere of what’s going in The Ultimates, the book that focuses on Iron Lad and Doom’s revolution against the Maker’s council, I do have faith that Hickman will be able to something interesting with this and I hope that the world’s true natural being revealed could lead to a sense greater of interconnectivity between the books in the Ultimate Universe line.

Just like in the other issues where Messina stepped in as guest artist, his art style is well done and fits the tone of Hickman’s writing and the slower and more character driven tone of his issues in contrast to the action orientated style of main artist, Marco Checchetto. However, I do feel that one thing that holds Messina’s art back in his USM issues is that I can’t help but feel as though he’s trying to bring his art work more in line with Checchetto’s rather than fully embracing his own strengths as an artist.

As Ultimate Spider-Man comes closer to reaching the conclusion of its first year, its consistently been one of the best books from Marvel and has been the comic that’s made me excited to read Spider-Man comics again after years of varying quality from the main line books so I’m very disappointed to say that this is the first issue of USM that’s failed to meet the high standards that the series has set for itself. Whilst it has some interesting concepts and sets up a really exciting development, a slow pace and a first half lacking in anything that hasn’t already been revealed to us results in an issue that feels little more than filler until it’s closing pages. With next issue introducing the Earth 6160 Incarnation of Black Cat, I have high hopes that this issue is just a little hiccup and that the series will be back to being one of the best comics currently being published by the big two.

6.5/10

[carriagelamp]

My internet died for about half a week this month, so I had a really peaceful few days where I had an enforced excuse to do nothing but relax and read when I got home from work. It was incredibly zen and I really sank into my books that week.

The Call of the Wild

A classic novel that I’ve always meant to read. I was sick and headachy this month and decided that this was the perfect sort of relaxing, narratively rich book to listen to. I really enjoyed it, would recommend. It follows a dog named Buck who’s snatched from his home in southern California and is shipped off to work as a sled dog in the Yukon, where a need for strong dogs to help transport goods over the snow and ice makes them very valuable. Buck has to learn how to survive in this harsh environment as everything from the weather, his fellows dogs, and his human masters seem to fight against him.

A Complicated Love Story Set In Space // How To Bite Your Neighbour and Win A Wager

Putting these two together because my experience with them was pretty similar. For both I was intrigued by the title, got them from the library on a whim, and didn’t really mesh with either. I didn’t really get far enough in either to give much of a review, they just didn’t vibe. A Complicated Love Story Set In Space set up a scenario that didn’t really interest me — not surprising, I’m picky about my scifi — and How To Bite Your Neighbour and Win A Wager just had an… odd writing style to it. It very much feels like it’s main goal is to be a kinda horny about vampires which, if that’s what you want, all the power to you, but it’s wasn't doing it for me. I had to suspend way too much disbelief for the scenario to function.

Indiana Jones and the Cup of the Vampire // Indiana Jones and the Curse of Horror Island

A pair of choose your own adventure books I found at a used book sale. I picked them up out of sheer amusement, and they were basically what I expected and paid for: cheesy 1980s adventure stories with Indiana Jones as a nominal protagonist. They were both varying degrees of improbable, ridiculous, and racist so YMMV but they were fun to play with while I was down and out on the internet front.

The Kootenay Kidnapper

Eric Wilson is a classic Canadian author who writes children’s mystery/thriller novels. I’ve never read him before and decided to remedy that. At this point I choose to withhold judgement until I read another… I’m not sure how I felt about The Kootenay Kidnapper. It had some nice descriptive language, successfully raised the tension from time to time and made me really try to piece together who the villain was, but then also had some strange dead zones as well. The whole thing read a bit like a 1990s stranger danger PSA which was also… weirdly nostalgic? But also just weird. Would try another.

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation comic v3

I continue to be a MDZS simp, this is not news. 

The Radium Girls

I don’t read much nonfiction, but this book was so narrative in its writing that I seriously couldn’t put it down. Kate Moore took a historical event (the girls that were paid to paint watch dials with radium paint in the early 1900s) that had been written about in scientific and legal styles, and instead retells it with a primary focus on the girls themselves. You follow a variety of real life women over the decades and learn about the all the machinations that went into them being horrifically poisoned by radium, and how that changed the very foundation of American workplace safety. Super engaging, unspeakably appalling.

Scott Pilgrim v1/2

My brother and I started watching Scott Pilgrim Takes Off on Netflix and… wow, it is not what either of us was expecting but we are loving it. We’ve both been big Scott Pilgrim fans since the naughts. Since I haven’t reread the series in years I decided I should pick it up to help notice the differences between the original series and this new show — I have the big, coloured omnibus version, so I reread the first collection of stories which amounts to volume 1 and 2 of the original. 

Scott Pilgrim is one of those comics that if you’ve somehow never read then you really need to, it’s one of my all-time favourites. It’s a story about Scott Pilgrim, a young adult who’s awkwardly trying to figure himself out, combining a coming-of-age slice-of-life with magical realism. The mysterious girl he meets, Ramona Flowers, can travel a subspace highway through Scott’s dreams — of course, don’t they teach Canadians how to do that? Huh, maybe it’s an American thing. Scott is known to be the best fighter in the province and when he defeats an enemy they explode into a pile of coins. One of the Evil Exes has Vegan Powers, and another can summon demonic back up dancers. This story just does whatever the fuck it likes and I adore it for that.

Heaven Official's Blessing v3/4

I continue to be TGCF simp, this is not— seriously, the series continues to be excellent and I only get more and more invested in not just Xie Lian and Hua Cheng, but also in the side characters that are introduced. I was thrilled to have Shi Qingxuan become a bigger player in book 4, and really liked the whole plot with the Venerable of Empty Words and Black Water. Please, someone, help this guy…

The Wind in the Willows

Another classic I had never read that I decided to pick up. It was excellent, I can see why it’s stayed so beloved over the years. Though I love a good cute-animals-in-lil-clothes-living-cute-lil-lives story, so I was an easy sell. It was much more tame than the likes of Redwall, but had a bit more going on than the likes of Brambly Hedge — it keeps you very engaged, but never raises the stakes so high that it stops feeling light and comforting. It is essentially a collection of stories that follow Mole and Rat, a pair of friends that live together on the river, through the seasons and the various misadventures they and their friends go on.

The Woman They Could Not Silence

Since I liked The Radium Girls I decided to pick up another one of Kate Moore’s books. This one follows a woman who was intentionally committed to an insane asylum by her husband, purely because she was intelligent and outspoken, refusing to be cowed to his opinions or beliefs. This story details her time in the insane asylum, the abuses that the patients suffered, and how she came to fight the laws that allowed for such abuses to be perpetuated in the first place. A fascinating read about a historical figure I had never heard about before.

[spaceorphanssecondbreakfastclub]

The X-Men Project : Children of the Atom

Uncanny X-Men 1-23 (1963-1966)

Collected in X-Men Epic Collections 1 : Children of the Atom

I’ve started this project a few times, and haven’t gotten too far -- but my main goal was to read through the main canon of X-Men comics chronologically for some time now.  I’m taking a new approach this time - reading them via trade paperback (and sometimes omnibus).  And of course in doing so, I’ve got to start at the beginning - which may be part of the reason this keeps slowing me down from getting too far.  

Because I have to start with Silver Age comics.  

So… long comic book history story short - the Golden Age of comics started in the 30s with the advent of comic adventures and super heroes.  Batman, Superman, Captain America - all larger than life heroes that kids could fall in love with.  And kids did - until the war came and changed things and comics were on the decline for a while and then - bam!  The 60s happened, and both DC and Marvel flourished in brightly colored, campy glory.  

The thing about Silver Age comics, though, is that these stories, while iconic, sure; were written for 8-12-year-old boys growing up in the early sixties.  There’s kind of a simple, standardness to all of them.  And while I won’t argue that modern day superhero comics are the cutting edge of literature or anything, Silver Age comics feel antiquated in a charming albeit somewhat dull way.  

Here’s the thing though - I’ve only read X-Men Silver Age comics.  The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The Avengers, and even Hulk were regarded in much higher standing.  And while Stan Lee’s idea to have superheroes naturally have powers -- unlike the plethora of humans being bombarded by radiation and getting their powers through increasingly more ridiculous ways - The X-Men were unique among superheroes.  But that didn’t make them all that interesting to read.  In fact - X-Men was the lowest read book for most of its original run.  

So… is it really that bad?  

Let’s break it down! 

The first trade paper I’m covering is part of the Epic Collections series - and covers the first 23 issues of Uncanny X-Men (the original run, which was just X-Men, I don’t think ‘Uncanny’ came until Chris Claremont).  It’s mostly written by Stan Lee (who leaves after issue 19 and is replaced by Roy Thomas) and drawn by the infamous Jack Kirby (who also leaves the book around 19, though other artists were helping with book many issues before).  

I feel like there’s a bit of novelty when you say Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.  But I think there’s a difference between nostalgia and quality.  Stan Lee is… fine as a writer.  I don’t think he does anything that special with the X-Men (while I haven’t read any other Silver Age - I’ve heard his work on other books was much better).  Jack Kirby’s art, though, is classic and clean and is the more interesting aspect to these comics.  

Each of the comics run a little bit in the same way.  We get an introduction (or reintroduction) to our heroes, the rise of some villainous conflict, the first fight in which our heroes lose and the second fight after a regrouping where our heroes win -- or on rare occasions things are postponed until the next issue.  Story arcs weren’t really a thing, neither was characterization.  Most of the comic is action based with the heroes using their powers to fight the bad guy.  And that’s, well, kind of it.  

The X-Men

The original line-up of X-Men might feel a little odd to people who are used to the movies or modern day comics.  Everyone knows that Charles Xavier founded the X-Men and runs a school in New York, but half the cast of the original movie hadn’t even been created yet.  

Charles Xavier - Mutant ability: Telepath and Telekinetic.  In a wheelchair.  The X-Men kind of all look up to him as a father like figure (especially Cyclops who is an orphan).  There are some aspects of his characterization that don’t necessarily hold up well -- such as his uncomfortable admiration of Jean Grey.  He also just has some odd unethical morals -- there are too many of these comics that end with Xavier literally just wiping out the bad guys’ and even civilians’ minds just to end the conflict.  He also had the tendency to fake his own illnesses to teach the X-Men a lesson. 

Scott Summers/Cyclops - The Leader - Mutant ability: shoots lasers out of his eyes.  Cyclops probably has the most distinct characterization right out of the gate.  He’s moody and broody and tormented about his mutation.  He’s interested in Jean Grey right from the start but can never tell her his true feelings.  (This is the closest we get to any kind of human interest drama in these comics - though it’s infrequent and never built upon.)  He takes life and his X-Men-ing very seriously. 

Warren Worthington III/Angel - The Playboy - Mutant Ability: Wings.  He can fly! He’s charming! And… that’s about it.  He’s rich and kind of has a flippant attitude about anything.  But it’s kind of hilarious at how lackluster he is.  He also sorta has eyes for Jean because you can’t have romantic drama without a love triangle. 

Hank McCoy/Beast - The Brainiac - Mutant Ability: Giant limbs and superhuman dexterity.  This was long before Beast was Blue! And it even takes a few issues for him to be defined as the smart one.  You can tell that whoever was writing Beast had a thesaurus next to them, as Beast cannot talk like a normal person.  He and Iceman are (kind of by default) bffs - though that isn’t developed as much in this first batch of issues.  

Bobby Drake/Iceman - The Jokester - Mutant Ability: Can freeze things, including himself.  He’s the youngest of the X-Men, and is always goofing around, never taking anything that seriously.  You can tell he’s supposed to be the comic relief, but I don’t think actual humor was Stan Lee’s strong point.  

Jean Gray/Marvel Girl - The Girl - Mutant Ability: Telekinetics.  Jean’s telepathy really isn’t developed until after the silver age.  Unfortunately, Jean isn’t written much beyond being a love interest for Cyclops and Angel - and checking off the obligatory woman box.  She doesn’t really even get a chance to shine (even though she clearly could be and will be the most powerful of them) -- every time she uses her powers she always grows tired really quickly and has to have one of the men save her.  It’s definitely eye roll-y how stuck in their time these comics are when it comes to gender, but it’s also not egregiously offensive.  

I have to point out that all of the X-Men at this point are supposed to be teenagers.  With the exception of Iceman, none of them really act like teenagers - and they’re all drawn like they’re in their mid-twenties.  It’s a little bit comical at how not good they were depicting teenagers.  

The Villains (worth mentioning) 

Every superhero team has their rogue’s gallery, and while the Silver Age is notable for having some hilariously ridiculous super villains, there are a handful that are worth mentioning, including some that become downright iconic in the X-Men world.  

Magneto - Master of Magnetism.  Long before his tragic WW2 history and his retconned BFF status with Xavier, Magneto was the original X-Men villain who definitely knew how to chew the scenery.  No seriously.  He might be over the top and ridiculous but he has the most distinct personality of any of these original villains, which does make him stand out.   Also, it’s kind of hilarious how much Magneto’s use of ‘magnetism’ breaks the laws of physics.  

Brotherhood of Evil Mutants! - let by Magneto.  Most of these guys are actually going to stick around for the long haul.  We have Toad (who is Magneto’s main lackey) and Mastermind (who will later become part of the Hellfire club) but most importantly Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch -- who, incidentally, were run out of Eastern Europe by an angry mob and rescued by Magneto himself, for whom they feel they owe a debt to.  They spend most of their time feeling torn about their decision until they eventually hop on over to join the Avengers later down the road.  

Namor - who is just hilariously sassy in his one appearance.  Magneto and Xavier astro project themselves to fight over which side he’s on, and he eventually tells both of them to screw off.  

Unus the  Untouchable - he doesn’t really make a big splash or anything, but I’m entertained that Beast was able to make a ray gun that amplifies this guy’s reflection power to the point where he can’t grab food.  Why he isn’t propelled from the Earth is beyond me if his power is pushing objects away from him, but hey, Silver Age Comics at their finest.  

The Stranger - I kind of love this guy and it’s a shame he never makes a reappearance - ever I believe.  He’s an alien checking out Earth and when Magneto annoys him too much, he whisks him away and abandons him on some desolate planet.  He’s also sassy.  

The Juggernaut - whom it’s set up from the beginning - was Xavier’s step brother.  Ngl, I was surprised when I read that.  But he’s as big and dumb as he always is.  

The Government & the Sentinels Project - they’re rather fully formed.  Another thing I was surprised about when I first read it.  

Mimic - Another character who doesn’t really come back all that often.  It’s a dude who can absorb everyone’s power at once.  He’s really kind of an ass about it, too, but he is the first official add on into the X-Men even if he leaves right away.  

Notable Things

Thematically, one of the big things about the X-Men is the fact that they are persecuted for being different.  Their minority status is kind of baked into the premise, and it’s something that’s going to permeate throughout the rest of the series.  It’s most notable when the government and sentinels come into play.  

It’s kind of fun to look at these as a time capsule of the 60s.  Everything has this 60s futuristic feel about it -- with all the ray guns and quirky costumes and reliance on nutty science.  It very much is a product of its time.  

Cerebro is a thing! I thought it came later - but Xavier came up with it very early on.  Kind of funny out of all the bonkers things they come up with in the Silver Age this one makes a lot of sense and sticks around.  

Favorite Issues

Issue #1 - It isn’t that ground breaking or even that memorable.  But it is the first issue and I think it is a pretty decent introduction to the characters.  I also want to note that I think the first X-Men movie was inspired by this first issue.  

Issue #4 - Not a favorite issue, actually, but a notable one.  The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants make their first appearance here.  I’d say the X-Men’s personalities kind of solidify here, too.  

Issue #6 - Namor makes his sassy appearance.  I think this is the issue where I found I could actually tolerate the ridiculousness of the Silver Age.  

Issue #11 - The Stranger appears and it is delightful.  

Issues #12-13 - Not only do we get Juggernaut’s first appearance, we also get a huge chunk of backstory for Xavier.  It’s actually a really tense couple of issues as Xavier tries to explain his path as this unknown entity slowly encroaches on the mansion.  It’s probably my favorite two issues of this particular run.  

Issue #18 - Everyone comes back from the whole sentinel saga that had taken up the previous three issues only to find that Magneto has been hiding out and capturing them all (Along with Angel’s parents).  Iceman is the only one left and has to rescue them all.  It’s kind of a clever concept.  

Least Favorite Issues 

Issue #10 - We get our first introduction to the Savage Land; this weird place in Antarctica that’s like the jungle with dinosaurs in it.  I’ve never been a fan of Savage Land stories as they usually bore me to tears.  

Issues #20-23 - This is just after Stan Lee leaves.  And while Roy Thomas is not doing a terrible job or anything, these villains are just dull and unmemorable, and at this point I want to just get on to the next volume.  

Final Thoughts

Once I get past some of this introductory stuff, I'll be able to make these reviews shorter. I feel like I've read a lot of these issues a hundred times because I haven't made it too far with this project. Glad to be finally moving forward.

Look - these aren't the best X-Men comics out there, but as someone who came into the Silver Age kicking and screaming, there is some charm to be found. But they aren't the comics that I'd normally read for fun.

[autumnslance]

sorry if you've been asked before, but how did you initially get into roleplaying and learn how to improve at it and be comfortable rping? it seems like something difficult to learn, especially rping in video games, so i'm always interested in how exactly people adjust to it

OK, let me preface by saying I am old enough to remember the Satanic Panic of the ‘80s and actually read Chick Tracts that were at places I went to with my parents. Including the infamous one about Dungeons & Dragons. They were real dumb; even as a church-going kid I knew Christian media was by and large…very There in quality often, so much of it being overtly about morals and messaging (the best really is more subtle or flat-out silly about it, letting the characters and events speak for themselves with only just a little requisite shoehorning to appease their publishing house requirements). And Chick was…something with those hyperbolic comic stories.

So I didn’t get to RP at all until I was an adult (19ish years old), and in the army away from home and was introduced to it via an entirely different gaming system and world I’d never heard of before, the World of Darkness specifically, second edition, and I was a kid who loved supernatural things like werewolves and other shifters a lot. My first RP character ever for a game that only ran once was a Metis Fianna Galliard.

Bless White Wolf, they tried. The old editions have some serious Problems in various ways looking back now with what I’ve learned since, but they Tried.

I went to my first Vampire LARP in Augusta, Georgia while in job training—this was back in the fall/winter of ‘98 and ‘99–and when I got to Kansas I met up with the guys in my unit who RPed Palladium game systems (Rifts, Palladium, Robotech, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, etc). My first Vampire: The Masquerade char was a Toreador (artiste vampire). My first Palladium fantasy char was a bardic demigod. Then I settled into a I think half-elf druid in Rifts and was the only one interacting with the GM’s attempts at story while the other guys talked about minmaxing their megadamage and waited for me/my character to point them at things. At the local independent LARP in Kansas I swapped the Toreador for a young Tremere named Lynell Marsden.

My buddy and eventual roommate, the LARP GM, introduced me to a RPG-themed webcomic whose premise made it ripe for online roleplay, which the readership did initially on the old forums in play-by-post, and then also in IRC chat in a series of rooms we had. My main characters were an Amberite soldier-princess and a drow cleric/bard of Eilistraee I brought in from a D&D game after a few years, as I expanded to many, many other gaming systems, like D&D and Shadowrun, and so many others I can’t remember them all. I ended up helping narrate and do admin work for the LARP and the World of Darkness games we ran in our own town as well as at a small local convention we attended for several years.

And dear Anon, I sucked at RP in my 20s.

Cuz I was new and learning. What appealed to Young Me, once properly explained by a peer and seeing the game rule books, was that Roleplay is collaborative improv storytelling. It’s playing pretend—which I’ve always loved to do!—but with an actual ruleset and boundaries. As a writer, it sounded so neat to sit around creating characters and telling stories with friends. The rules were there as randomizer but also to help balance and make sure everyone could contribute (well, once one stopped playing freakin’ Rifts…).

In free form play-by-post, and in the IRC chat, there weren’t really rules like you’d find in a gaming book for at the table; you had whatever rules for the forum or chatroom the mods made, usually about being courteous and communicating, but the characters varied wildly. Each thread or room GM had their own ways to run their stories. Communication was key. Letting others get time in the spotlight. Making attempts, working things out, not being afraid to fail on purpose (even if your character was trying) cuz sometimes that was more interesting. We had some random commands for dice we sometimes used in the chat, but it could depend on who was running that particular session or storyarc.

It took practice. And mistakes I still look back on and wince at myself about, more for the times I hurt others or made things less fun for them, than my own creative errors that weren’t good for my characters (and I made bad choices for my characters aplenty). OK, and also for the times I spent staying up way too late roleplaying, plotting, chatting, when I should have been responsible and sleeping due to work and/or class in the mornings…But I also don’t entirely regret all those lost sleep hours.

LynMars, my common internet handle, comes from that Tremere I played for a few years in my friend’s LARP, before retiring her to play other characters. I made many Baby RPer mistakes on Lynell, she was a learning character, and while I messed her and her story up badly, I still love her as one of my firsts and ended up using her name as a handy online identity and also a reminder to myself.

You don’t have to do or be everything, especially on one character; everyone has specialties and limits, it’s what helps with the collaborative parts and team play. Learn and know your own boundaries. Respect others’ boundaries. Learn OOC doesn’t equal IC but also doesn’t give rein to be a jackass IC in a collaborative setting. Communicate. Be willing to collaborate and compromise. Be willing to lose as often as you win, sometimes the better story comes out of it. Build your characters with some grounding as people; give them flaws (sometimes their virtues taken too far can also count!), let them make mistakes, let them have their own stories so when they interact with other characters, you’re actually improv acting that person, not yourself in a funny hat.

I reconnected with my old webcomic-based group over the pandemic and people still talk fondly of my old characters and stories, and I have some good memories of theirs. A lot of things we all look back at 21-to-13-ish years later now and cringe and laugh at ourselves about, but the memories of those times are still mostly good and about the fun we had together back then, despite the clunky nature of our storytelling, our mishandled character concepts, the wank and stressors, the few bad apples we did have in the old community, the mistakes we made. We still remember the cool stuff and how it made us feel and why we sought each other out again to just say Hi. And in some cases, ended up playing games together again.

My experiences in forum and chatroom RP made the jump into MMO RP in WoW (back in Classic!) fairly easy, honestly. It was pretty much the same thing, only we had actual avatars and environments and in-built emotes as well as whatever gestures or settings we described for when the game didn’t have something. I wrote stories of my characters, many of them still up on my alt blogs, and collaborated on a few stories and RPs with friends.

After several years, some people had weird ideas I was “popular” and “established” and “good” so stirred up wank and jealousy that hit me out of the blue, especially since we were on a small server whose RP community was dying off as folks migrated away (from the server or WoW in general) and we were just among the last RP groups to still hang around out of inertia. They wanted to be a Big Fish in our drying-out pond, and didn’t like that I told them that it takes time and effort to build a story and a group with the reputation they sought, that one has to make time to run events on a regular basis and be there for it even if turn out isn’t great. I hope they’ve figured out what they want to do and better ways to do it since then.

Cuz even after 13ish years of WoW RP on top of all my tabletop and LARP and chatroom experiences, I still made some mistakes. I still sometimes ran and played in some mediocre to bad RP. For my characters and their stories, and in interactions with other RPers.

It’s OK. Learn from those errors, talk it out with your pals and others, keep IC and OOC knowledge and feelings separate, be willing to bend (not break; compromise means all involved parties have to give and get a little) for collaboration and interaction, know who you can only interact with in public RP events with a polite nod and small talk and otherwise not engage with—kinda like in real life, when you have to be tolerant or nice to those irritating classmates or coworkers but otherwise don’t deal with them more than you must.

It’s simply being social, with imagination thrown in. Remembering the stories are pretend, but there are real people behind those words and characters. The nuts and bolts of how to do emotes, which tense to use, whether to use /random or other dice commands…that’s just variable detail that can change as needed. Being a decent person OOC to make an enjoyable story—“good” or “bad”—IC with others is what’s important.

I don’t really RP online now, as I just don’t have the time or energy I used to—especially for the inevitable wank, as Roleplayers are by and large a dramatic bunch with our own hangups, awkwardness, and miscommunications galore (so many callout posts I’ve seen where I’ve wondered if the grievances were IC and came from lack of OOC communication about expectations, boundaries, and blurring the lines between characters and players. So many). These days I stick to my silly nonsense fanfics and some tabletop RP with friends—though due to us being scattered across the continent, we usually end up playing via Roll20 or similar programs to mimic it in an online environment, and even my local group’s had to do that during the pandemic and now with two players moving away soon, on top of the usual trials of being adults making time for games together. I could likely get into FFXIV RP easily enough, here on Tumblr and in game, if I were so inclined.

But it takes time. And constant learning. Figuring out the community norms and methods, which ones work for you, and which don’t. Giving yourself a bit of grace. Knowing your boundaries and respecting others’. Being social and willing to communicate, not being afraid of it, or making assumptions, giving benefit of the doubt—to yourself as much as to others. Patience. And just focusing on the fun and the good and who cares if it’s a bit cringey and weird and silly and dumb with outrageous characters so long as folks are feeling included, treated fairly, and having a good time.

That’s really what’s important.

[semper-legens]

155. Y: The Last Man, book one, by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra

Owned: No, library Page count: 246 My summary: One day, for no reason anyone could divine, all of the men on Earth died at once. Everyone with a Y chromosome fell prey to this sweeping arm of death - except two. Yorick, and his pet monkey. Now the world is in ruins, but all Yorick wants is to find his girlfriend who is half the world away. But everyone else wants him dead... My rating: 2/5 My commentary:

I had heard good things about this comic, despite its premise being a bit wonky, and I come away ridiculously disappointed by it. I’m sorry, this story was just not interesting. The assumptions that it makes about gender, the criticisms it makes towards feminism, the blandness of the main character...I didn’t see much in it to like, and I am definitely not going to be reading the rest.

My main beef with the story is the Amazons, a feminist group that appears after the men die for...some reason. They’re crazy! They burn sperm banks, believe all men are evil and should be killed (despite that having, you know, happened as far as they know), and burn off a breast to make archery easier for...some reason. They’re hateful and villainous and, like, this isn’t what a lot of feminism is. Oh sure, radfems are like this in real life, but this is less a nuanced criticism of radical feminist thought and more LOOK AT ALL THOSE MAN-HATIN’ FEMINISTS, THEY SURE ARE EVIL, you know what I mean? I really question why a group like this would appear after all the men are dead.

Secondarily, the assumptions this book makes about gender are...questionable? I don’t doubt that the stats it quotes about which professions have now lost a lot of their personnel are accurate to 2002, when this first released, but just because 99% of all electricians, say, are dead, doesn’t mean that nobody with those skills survived. You can know how to do a thing and not be a professional in that field. Where are all the car-fixin’ butch lesbians? And would all the men dying necessarily cause an apocalyptic scenario like this? It’s not like, historically, in scenarios without men, women haven’t just. Got on with things. Like in the world wars, or in towns where all the men were killed in mines or at sea.

You notice how I’ve gotten this far without talking about the main character? That’s because Yorick is boring as fuck. He’s just a generic straight white guy. Everyone else wants to bone and/or murder him (in a gender-swapped version of this, girl!Yorick would almost certainly be immediately enslaved for breeding, but guy!Yorick gets to wander around and be free through the power of manliness) but all he wants is to find his boring girlfriend and be boring together. There are so many characters in this sort of world I would want to follow, and the narrative is not interested in any of them.

And, I’m sorry, this book’s treatment of trans people is disgusting. Not only have all trans women and transfeminine people been murdered out of hand by this mysterious plague that only affects people with a Y chromosome (chromosomes are not that simple, but I digress), but the one time the series acknowledges trans men is by a character mentioning a boyfriend, then to say that ‘she’ was a ‘tr*nny’ who was murdered by the Amazons despite not being a ‘real’ guy. I don’t think I need to say why this is horrible.

Next up, something far better - history, and a cautionary tale about getting trapped in the Antarctic ice.

[jaydonsjam]

Hellstrom V/Defenders VI

Marvel Spotlight #18-19

Marvel Spotlight #18-19 - writer: Steve Gerber | penciler: Gene Colan | inker(s): Frank Monte (#18), Mike Esposito (#19)

This was EXACTLY what I wanted from this series! Steve Gerber knocked the last arc out of the park and I’d say he did even better with this exorcism arc. Gene Colan is my favorite artist from the books I’ve read from this era (late 60’s-70’s) and I was so excited to see that he did the art for these two issues. He brings that horror aesthetic that his art excels in Tomb of Dracula to this book. This felt like the first time where the Son of Satan has truly gone in the horror genre and it just enraptured me. Daimon goes to a party with Dr. Reynolds and meets Wilfred Noble and his dog, Cerberus. I really liked Noble and felt so bad when the demon killed his dog. I’m glad they didn’t show it and kept the dog’s body shadowed. It still had the same affect. I love the idea that Allatou the demon who possessed Melissa Manners to burn Noble’s house down and murdered his dog had the ability to body jump. It made the exorcism more interesting when Daimon is trying to banish the demon, he’s having to contend with several different people. I loved this story and it was effective in making me care about Reynolds and see more of her.

Marvel Spotlight #20-22

Marvel Spotlight #20-22 - writer: Steve Gerber | penciler: Sal Buscema | inker(s): Al McWilliams (#20), Joe Giella (#21), Bob McLeod (#22)

I’m not gonna lie, this arc came off very problematic. They drop the g-slur countless times. I found myself losing interest as we got deeper into the arc just because it felt so stereotypical and kinda gross honestly. There’s an “evil witch”who’s called the g-slur the whole time and they even go the whole way by saying she g’d them. You guys know that I’m always honest in my thoughts and opinions on this stuff and this storyline has just not aged well at all. The only part I liked about this arc was Daimon having to fight his other half inside his own head. I loved how he realized that they are better together because otherwise they are going to be stuck in an endless loop of fighting. It was actually a really cool idea. Also we finally got to see Satana and Daimon together even though I’m not sure if she was really in his head or just a construction of his mind. I love her powers by the way. I read her appearance in Vampire Tales and I love that she’s a succubus who sucks the soul out of people and their soul comes out in the form of a butterfly. I want more Satana cause she’s awesome. So yeah, I’m not gonna go through the plot here just cause I didn’t like it and it’s clearly outdated. If anyone wants to read it, you have the issue numbers above so you can see for yourself. Also I gotta say Sal Buscema did the art and it was fantastic.

Giant-Size Defenders #2

Giant-Size Defenders #2 - writer: Len Wein | penciler: Gil Kane | inker: Klaus Janson

This was a fun crossover. I loved seeing Doctor Strange meet Daimon. I gotta say it’s weird how there’s a Satan, Satana, Satannish, Mephisto, Baphomet, etc. like I would love a comic to explain these demons and which one is actually Satan. I’m a little confused right now. Asmodeus returned at the main bad guy for this issue which was cool. I like his design a lot. I love how he tried to use his powers on Daimon but it didn’t work because he was holding his trident. That’s a cool touch that just adds to the mythos surrounding Daimon. Also, I didn’t mention up top but I love how Daimon flies holding the trident with flames shooting out. I liked that this continues Valkyrie’s struggle with her identity through the hellish visions she’s struck with. The highlight of the whole Defenders comic so far is Valkyrie’s arc. The guilt of her existence and identity when she took the body of someone else and does she deserve to live inside someone else? It’s masterful storytelling and I fucking love it. She’s probably my favorite Defender (not named Dr. Strange). This was a cool team-up with the Son of Satan and has lots of fun action and it left me wishing Daimon would’ve joined the team. This was a fun issue and I can’t wait to see what comes next with Val and the rest of the team.

[ilikekidsshows]

One thing that pisses me off not just about the miraculous fandom but modern fandoms is fans inability to consume long overarching stories.

Like so many people are complaining about how long the reveal is taking or why haven't certain characters outgrown this trait yet or why is this character arc botched or abandoned. Like guys we just got the confirmation this show will be 7 seasons long PLUS like 3 tv specials. We're only roughly halfway through the series.

Once the reveal happens half the tension in the show is gone! I'm not saying leave the reveal till season 7 and make us wait 9 years this isn't HIMYM but miraculous is not a fast paced story. It's a long haul story. I just wish more fans would be patient. Miraculous is in the extremely fortunate and rare position that it will have a conclusive end and not be suddenly cancelled. That was and still is a huge problem for shows and cartoons with dedicated fans but networks pull the plug for stupid ass reasons.

So miraculous fans please chill the fuck out on things not resolving right away. We still have 78+ episodes plus the tv specials. If we get the end to certain things now it'll be so boring.

I think the concept of Instant Gratification describes the issue with many modern fandoms today. I hate to sound like I'm anti-technology, but the constant stream of quick and short bursts of entertainment allowed by the information age has made people more impatient. It's not about waiting for the climax to get a deeper sense of satisfaction, it's about getting that instant gratification right this instant. It's why one-shot fanfics are all over the place, when multi-chapter stories used to be just as common and popular, if not even more so, and it’s also why people are less willing to read a fic that’s still a work in progress. It's why people refuse to watch Youtube video essays even as they leave comments on the topic based on the title and thumbnail alone because, while they couldn't be assed to watch a 20-minute video (let alone an hour long one), they sure can spend that time calling the Youtuber names and making arguments the video actually already refutes. It's why a lot of online arguments happen only because one party read nothing but the first and maybe the last paragraph of someone's post and skipped all the explanation for their point of view (if I've ignored an counter argument for one of my posts, it was either because I missed it or because said counter argument did this. I have attention deficit issues so I do genuinely forget responses sometimes, but I'm also not writing a second essay for someone who's proven to me they won't read it).

Of course, it's only by constantly consuming only fast-paced content that you can become this impatient. People have different ideas about stories based on what stories they have encountered in the past.

Another thing that influences the Miraculous fandom in particular is that, while I love to show off exactly how much Miraculous has done to build up the overarching plotlines, Miraculous isn't really a show that's about a single story. It's easy to understand why people think it is one though: there's one main villain, we keep discovering more about the mythology, one of the main plot threads is the romantic relationship between the leads and singular episodes and plot elements tend to get payoff later. What is the purpose of a show if not to progress the story? Because the heroes aren't getting closer to defeating Gabriel or getting together, people think that the story isn't accomplishing anything.

I'll do a comparison to illustrate why these things aren't as clear-cut signs of a continuous storyline as people think. In the Spider-Man comics, you can pick any issue up and the chances are that the villain will be a part of Spider-Man's already established Rogues Gallery, who's back for more after who knows how many defeats, and those past defeats might even get referenced in callbacks to previous issues. It's also very possible that Peter and Mary Jane's relationship is the central focus with them not being together yet, having relationship problems or even having broken up (in really old issues the girl might be Gwen Stacy and short-term options have also always been available for romantic entanglements). Does this mean Spider-Man is a continuous story where the only point is that all the villains get put away for good and Peter and MJ live happily ever after? No, it doesn't. Spider-Man is designed to go on indefinitely, so there's no clear ending point. So, what is the point of Spider-Man then, if there is no Ending?

It used to be the single issue, because comic books used to have every issue be a stand-alone story about the hero and their supportive cast. These days it's more every three-to-six issues, because superhero comics are written to have short story arcs that can then be collected into trade paperbacks. A superhero series is not a single story; it's a series that functions as a story engine, meaning the series can generate several shorter stories where the hero helps fix a problem or solve a mystery.

In the superhero genre a villain will never get killed off or removed from stories permanently as long as the writers think they can still come up with stories to tell about them. The hero's romantic life will never be completely smooth sailing unless the writer is using other things to ramp up the stakes. Everything always allows for there to be another adventure.

I think the huge success of Avatar: the Last Airbender made people think that a series that is a single story is always superior to a series with multiple shorter plots. When I was liveblogging Sailor Moon, a viewer offered to give me a list of all the non-filler episodes because they genuinely thought I'd feel like I was wasting time on the show otherwise. This attitude is simply not based on fact. It's not fair to compare Miraculous Ladybug to Avatar, because they're both setting up to do completely different things. Miraculous Ladybug is trying to become a brand, like Batman or Spider-Man. It is part of the "Zag Heroes" lineup, a series of French-created superhero franchises to compete in the America-centric superhero market. This challenge is good for the genre, because Marvel and DC have started resembling each other more and more as these companies stew in their old ideas and copy everything that worked for the other one. The superhero genre needs new blood.

Also, Avatar: the Last Airbender first became popular by doing episodic plots for almost the entirety of the first season because it's actually not a wise choice to expect the audience to be willing to commit to a story that'll only give payoff later when working with an untested IP. Very often shows with longer story arcs start with the episodic format to hook people first, and sometimes the more linear plot is introduced specifically because the audience for the show is now expected to be both dedicated enough and older and capable of keeping up. Because, here's the thing: you can't expect little kids to remember every episode or even every character you've introduced in your show. I'm not sure if people are ready to hear that but I'm throwing it out there anyway. Kids are not dumb, they can understand more complex storylines, but many kids are still training their memory, so they might not remember the details of complex storylines that go on for too long.

This is why the news that Miraculous Ladybug's fourth season was going to have a recommended viewing order originally had me concerned. Miraculous is being branded for kids. The plot requiring too much skill in memorizing story details will make it less accessible to kids and might put those two additional seasons at risk. However, it seems that the "constantly changing status quo" concept of Truth, Lies and Gang of Secrets was a fluke and the evolution of the show is more subtle, so they might not be cutting the amount of episodes for those final seasons because the show is getting too complicated for kids to follow all the important details.

Regardless, Miraculous Ladybug being an adventure cartoon TV show instead of a comic book or a more cheaper-to-produce TV drama does mean that Miraculous Ladybug isn’t expected to go on for decades like a superhero comic or a soap opera. Because of this, it can have evolution and changes and even a planned ending. The show is expected to end at some point, even by the people making money off of it, mostly because making a cartoon like this indefinitely costs a lot of money, and kids’ adventure shows tend to see a decrease in returns if they go on for too long.

[ectonurites]

so i want to read red robin but uh. i'm missing a lot of context so do you know which comics i should read before starting it?

Okay. So. Red Robin 

Ideally, Red Robin comes after reading through Tim’s Robin run in general, as it’s basically a continuation of that comic. It’s not like you need to read every single comic he’s appeared in before or anything like that... but I just definitely wouldn’t recommend this being like... the first major Tim-focused story you read, if that makes sense? The way he acts in Red Robin hinges upon a lot of previous things having happened, as opposed to him acting like his more normal self. 

But lets go into some specific things that are important for understanding what’s going on in Red Robin assuming you’ve got some basic Tim info/understanding under your belt already:

Final Crisis - What happened to Bruce during Final Crisis is essentially the main driving force of the first bit of Red Robin, in general I’d recommend reading the whole event to understand it because just part of it without context would probably be really confusing (this is the reading list I used) but it can definitely be... overwhelming, it was a huge thing. The parts with Bruce are what’s most relevant: Batman #682-683, Final Crisis #6-7 and Superman/Batman #76

Robin (1993) - As I said above, in general Red Robin is the continuation of Tim’s Robin run. Events from the last major arc ‘Search for a Hero’ (Robin #177-183), which has the same writer as the second half of Red Robin, are especially relevant. In general though, reading through Tim’s Robin run helps you to... understand Tim more, and kinda see how the things he’s going through in Red Robin are a change for him, he’s acting a lot darker and edgier than normal because of all the things he’s been going through basically since War Games happened. (Steph’s death during that event was kinda the kickoff of his traumas in the 2000s, as it was followed by his Dad’s death in Identity Crisis, Kon’s in Infinite Crisis, and Bart’s in The Flash: Fastest Man Alive. While these don’t all specifically get referenced in Red Robin necessarily, and aside from his Dad they do all come back, these incidents along with Bruce’s apparent fate during Final Crisis are all things that have been weighing on him heavily and contribute to his mental state)

Battle for the Cowl - While this is kinda a hot mess of an event (particularly for Jason), it’s extremely important for context. Here’s a reading list, although personally I’ve just read the TPB for the event that I physically own that just has the main BftC comic & the two Gotham Gazette issues, which is what’s most relevant for Tim specifically.

That’s the like, most important context stuff going into it I think? There’s definitely a few other things potentially worth checking out like the rest of the Batman: Last Rites tie-ins (Batman #682-683 & Robin #183 that I already listed above are part of that, those are most relevant for reading Red Robin but for a general understanding of what else is happening in Gotham at the time consider checking out the rest), which all lead into Battle for the Cowl.

After Battle for the Cowl, the Batman: Reborn event is what establishes the new status quo in Gotham. (Red Robin #1-4 is considered part of this event. While you don’t need to read every other Batman: Reborn thing to understand what’s going on in Red Robin, certain little details and questions you may have about characters who are now in different positions than before are explained in the other titles so it’s worth looking into. But all of these were coming out around the same time as Red Robin so it’s not so much a ‘read before’ as a ‘read alongside if you’re interested’ ya know?) 

Then I know you didn’t ask for this but I’d like to add a few specific things I think are helpful to read during Red Robin, some the Red Robin comic itself will tell you about as they crossover but some it won’t!

Adventure Comics #3 - This one it’s kiiinda hard to tell exactly where it fits into Red Robin, some time during the first arc when Tim’s on his search still, my best guess is just sometime before Red Robin #4. This is essentially Tim & Kon’s first real reuniting since Kon came back to life during Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds. This issue also references things with Tim that happened during the One Year Later part of Teen Titans (2003) in issues #34-37. It doesn’t necessarily do too much to the plot of Red Robin but I think it’s relevant reading, and it later gets referenced in Red Robin #9.

Blackest Night: Batman - This one... also kinda hard to figure out exactly where it fits in, I think right after Red Robin #5 makes the most sense since it’s definitely before #6 (because Tim references the event during that issue) but it has to be after he finds what he finds in #4, and #4 kinda goes directly into #5. This is a tie in for the Blackest Night event but as long as you get the basic premise of ‘Black Lantern rings make zombies’ then it can be read pretty independently. 

Batgirl - It’s very clear where this crossover happens in the comic, After Red Robin #9 read Batgirl #8, then the rest of the arc is continued in Red Robin #10 and on. 

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne - So, this book builds on Tim’s findings earlier in Red Robin as well as what Dick and Damian discovered/pieced together in Batman and Robin (2009) Issues #7-12 in regards to what happened to Bruce during Final Crisis. I’d recommend reading the first two issues of this (Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #1-2) before Red Robin #16. Then after that issue, read the rest (Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #3-6). Alternatively you could just read all of it after #16, before the next thing I’m about to list, it doesn’t make a huge difference. It’s just that in Red Robin #16 Tim references that the events of this book had already started, but he hadn’t become involved yet, and he gets involved in #3. Regardless, read this before The Road Home: Red Robin.

The Road Home: Red Robin - This one is specifically mentioned to take place after Red Robin #16, but I’d really really recommend reading Return of Bruce Wayne first and then this. Afterwards go back into Red Robin #17.

Teen Titans - This crossover technically is first teased at the end of Teen Titans #91, but primarily starts in Red Robin #20 and then continues into Teen Titans #92.

Judgement on Gotham - This event starts in Batman #708, crosses over into Red Robin in Issue #22, Gotham City Sirens #22, and ends in Batman #709.

There are a few other things Tim shows up in around this time (The Gates of Gotham series is the first thing coming to mind, as well as after the crossover with them he rejoins the Teen Titans, but he also just shows up occasionally in the other bat books based in Gotham during this time) but they don’t really have any effect on the plot of Red Robin specifically.

I hope this makes sense and isn’t too confusing! In general like, this era between Final Crisis and the New 52 had so much going on in the Bat books that there’s like... lots of moving pieces to keep track of. Hopefully this can at least point ya in the right direction. 

[luimnigh]

Okay so I've fallen down the Mass Effect Wiki rabbithole and it is fucking insane how many characters and plot points in these games were established by expanded universe novels released months or years before the games that feature them.

And honestly? They do a pretty good job of intergrating them into the games in such a way you don't ever get the whiff of expanded universe off them.

But if you did read the expanded universe stuff as it came out, you'd end up spoiled on a bunch of stuff.

Like for example, the first novel, Mass Effect: Revelation, was released six months before the first game. And aside from serving as the first ever look at the world of Mass Effect, it also centers on the mission gone wrong with Anderson and Saren.

Aside from that, it includes Kahlee Sanders, the Blue Suns, and makes mention of Sovereign. Two of those don't even get introduced until later games!

Mass Effect: Ascension, meanwhile, was released a year after ME1, and two years before ME2.

It introduces the Illusive Man and has Cerberus as it's main threat.

No seriously.

It also features Grissom Academy, and the attack on the Migrant Fleet ship Idenna, which Tali mentions when you recruit her.

And the third novel, Mass Effect: Retribution, released six months after ME2, within ME2's DLC lifecycle, and a year and a half before ME3, guess who shows up?

Kai. Fucking. Leng.

(I've spoken before about how Kai Leng should have been introduced in ME2 or it's DLC to build him up before ME3, and guess what? He existed back then! It was possible!)

Also Cerberus investigating how to huskify people. That's also a thing you'd be spoiled on by that book.

And finally, there's Mass Effect: Invasion, a comic series published in the months leading up to ME3, starting in October 2011 and ending in January 2012, two months before ME3's release, and basically a full year before the Omega DLC.

It details Cerberus' takeover of Omega, including General Petrovsky, and the Adjutants.

As someone who only got into Mass Effect after everything had been release, the amount you could get spoiled on just seems nuts to me.

[theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin]

First, I just want to say that I love reading your rants/head cannons/opinions. I find them VERY entertaining and true. Now, I read your opinions on James, Sirius, Harry, Ron, and Hermione. I want to know what you think of Draco and Neville. I honestly think that Draco is an asshole, but I want to know exactly what you think. P.S. Can't wait for the next chapter of "When Harry Met Tom"

Well, at the very least, I’m glad I’m entertaining.

Now for Draco and Neville, interesting choices actually, I don’t usually spend much thought on those two. Never the less, let’s dive in and see what we find.

Draco Malfoy

There’s a lot of varying opinion on Draco Malfoy. In my long tenure of stalking the internet, fanfiction, and even more fanfiction I’ve found that in many cases he ceases to actually be a character but instead becomes this unholy agglomeration of tropes people like.

Seriously, Draco Malfoy isn’t even a person anymore. He’s leather pants.

What’s interesting to me is that it’s not even always the same tropes. Well, you tend to see the same ones bandied about, but it’s not even like characters like Tom Riddle or Hermione Granger where I can usually narrow it down to a few very precise characterizations you see everywhere. Draco’s all over the place.

You have bad boy Draco who’s varying levels of actually being bad boy so that we can use him instead of a young Tom Riddle. This is generally in stories where an author wants an antihero or else villain love interest, they like the Draco or bad boy aesthetic, but Tom Riddle is too spicy for Yog Sothoth. So Draco reminds us he’s evil a lot, he usually betrays our main love interest in a dramatic yet inevitable moment, but he’s not the purest of evil. He leaves the puppy beside the well and watches as Tom drowns it for him. Despite this the story will often pretend that Draco’s the most evil of evil to raise the stakes.

You have non-problematic Draco who suddenly was never a Death Eater, or perhaps his family was always filled with spies for the Order of the Phoenix, who only pretended to hate muggleborns and really has been on the good side this whole time! Alternately, Draco was on the bad side, but within two seconds of the fic he’s switched sides and we’re told it’s cool now because Draco understands. 

You have Sexy McLeatherPantsFace Draco who never left My Immortal but authors will claim, should you ask, that bisexual overly emotional Draco’s characterization is nothing like My Immortal’s and how dare you imply such things you swine! Really, his pervasive existence is why My Immortal is such a great satire. 

The list goes on but basically Draco’s whatever people need or want him to be to an absurd degree and it always makes me laugh. Oh Draco, what have they done to you? Are you even in there anymore?

Right, where do I land on Draco? Honestly, he’s a bit like Ron in that he has severe character flaws but he’s not goddamn insane like Harry or Hermione.

Mostly though, I just don’t take him seriously.

Throughout the book series he’s an ass, he’s that rich, elitist, entitled jackass that we all have run into at some point or another. He’s the kid who legitimately thinks ‘my father will hear about this’ is a threat and constantly abuses his relationship with Severus Snape just to show how cool he is ‘he practically makes Snape dish out punishment to Harry and Ron needlessly, and Snape is such a sad ridiculous man he actually goes along with it and panders to this brat’. 

Draco’s the kind of ridiculous fucking person who pretended to not have the use of his arm for months just so he could get Hagrid fired. When, honestly, Lucius still could have gotten Hagrid fired probably without Draco’s very non-compelling evidence. (Now, that said, I do believe Hagrid never should have had the job/should have been fired, but that’s a different story). And then, when he realized not having an arm kind of sucked, he was miraculously healed. 

Harry takes Draco and his rivalry very seriously because he’s also an adolescent, lacks perspective, and just isn’t that bright but Draco is fucking ridiculous and half the time he’s embarrassing himself. I mean, the guy buys his position onto the Slytherin team with an absurd amount of money, and he still loses matches to the Gryffindor team. Draco should never be living that down.

So, basically, I never at any point take Draco seriously. He’s just a kid with a big mouth who grew up in a very racist household and never has any idea what he’s talking about ever. He’s not inherently evil, not particularly good either, he’s just a kid who’s more obnoxious than your usual brand of kid.

I never imagined him particularly good looking (I believe his features are described as pinched or something), I never really saw the appeal in either making him more evil than he was or else redeeming him, he’s kind of the comic relief we all needed in our lives but is really there to keep the filler plot going to give Harry and the gang time to stew on the bigger Hogwarts mysteries. Without Draco what would we even do for hundreds of pages?

When it comes to book six he starts getting a little interesting in that his life completely falls apart but I think many fics paint him as far more self aware than he was. He knows his family is in deep trouble but I don’t think he realizes they’re being punished. I don’t think he realizes that Tom setting up camp in Casa Malfoy is a direct response to a) his failure with the diary b) his failure with the prophecy. Well, he might, but I imagine Lucius or Naricssa had to point it out to him. More, I think he genuinely believes he is meant to succeed in the task of assassinating Dumbledore.

He never realizes that Voldemort fully expects him to fail, that this task is just to essentially torture Draco for months, and when Draco does fail Voldemort will then murder him in front of Lucius saying, “AND THAT’S WHY WE DON’T SELL TOM RIDDLE’S THINGS!” This I think is evident in Draco accepting Bellatrix’s help, but not Snape, legitimately thinking that he has to achieve this on his own and that the Dark Lord has given him this Very Important Task (TM). 

Basically, Draco’s a kid over his head and doesn’t even realize he’s in over his head. More, I think even in book seven he still believes in the dark lord’s cause. It’s all become this weird madhouse but we don’t ever really see him come to grips that this is madness. It’s hard to tell because we’re from Harry’s perspective, but Draco never really seems all that unwilling of a Death Eater. Instead he’s very proud to have become one and sure, Hogwarts got a little weird, but that’s okay! 

In other words, I don’t think Draco ever really had that redemption arc people thought he did or hoped he would. Harry just saves his life, Narcissa is forever grateful to Harry, and then Draco continues to shuffle along in life perhaps in a daze wondering what even happened.

TL;DR Draco’s just a guy.

Neville Longbottom

Oh man, poor Neville, why is he even friends with the gang when they treat him like such garbage all the time? Neville’s kind of like the friend who’s sort of friends with this one social group but they constantly forget him except when it’s convenient to them. 

Not just forget him but brush him off, make fun of him, and barely speak with him.

Neville has no friends and it’s really just sad that he’s stuck with these people. 

As for Neville himself, he seems nice, that’s really all I have on him. We don’t see too much of him, his life is garbage from beginning to end (his relatives throw him out a goddamn window), he’s treated like trash by everyone and no one respects him but he still seems nice.

Not particularly interesting, but a nice enough kid who doesn’t deserve to be treated like shit all the time. That said, I guess somebody’s got to be Gryffindor comic relief and plot convenience, so it’s time for Neville to forget the passwords yet again and be left out all night because portraits suck.

[house-of-slayterr]

Good morning/night! I love your recent post! I love how Maggie sympathize with our newly revived villain. All though I hate him in other shows/movies, you write him to be more likeable (≧▽≦)

I also loved your post about Basil, I love that the family is growing 💗

So... I was wondering if we could add another member? I wanna give Maggie a traumatized sibling 😀

One of y/n's underdogs from the mafia? And she and y/n have an Akutagawa and Dazai from bsd relationship? If you're not busy ofc ☺️

Omg I’m so glad you like my version of Grodd. I to don’t really enjoy his on screen adaptations, I think they did him dirty in the Flash. I mean hello, telepathic gorilla! He’s baby. Similar to Ivy, his motives makes sense, his execution is just what’s bad. But I wanted to bring in some more outside characters, maybe an excuse to have the Gotham characters interact with some people from Flash. They already have a branch out to Arrow.

I’m also really glad you’re enjoying Basil! I’m loving him so much so far. I feel like he’s way smarter than he lets off. He likes to seem nonchalant and I feel like he’s more on the emotionless side like Y/N and Victor. Considering he himself isn’t a human, he probably doesn’t care as deeply about human life as Maggie does.

I’m not quite sure about adding anyone else just yet. Of course I do love the idea, so thank you for suggesting it. But I don’t think now is the right time. There’s a lot to write already if that makes sense. But don’t worry, Maggie does have traumatised siblings. Have you seen Oliver and Thea? They are both messes. I mean Oliver has 8 seasons worth of trauma 😂 plus Thea after she comes back to life and half of her soul is gone because of thre Lazarus pit. And then she learns that’s her father isn’t even her father and has to be trained by Malcom Merlyn. So not against new characters, maybe let’s just flesh out these ones a little more first. Maybe you could ask Flay if they have any ideas for someone new?

So how about if I have her interact with her siblings a little more. Maybe Thea comes to her confessing she found out the truth about who her father is. I feel like Maggie would feel like an ass for not being there for her little sister. Not that she knew this revelation would happen, but she’d certainly blame herself for not checking in more. And it could be fun to have Oliver find out just how deep his little sister has gotten tangled in this villain web. I feel like he would try to “ground” her, and this would probably result in a verbal fight with Y/N and a physical fight with Victor.

I don’t think I’ve written much of Maggie just interacting with Victor yet. So maybe I’ll have them bond a bit more. But I feel like although he’s only a yandre for Y/N (and by association her “kids”) he doesn’t like when people try to control his “play things” so if Oliver came to town demanding Maggie come back home, or is Kara did the same for Basil, he would flip. Nobody takes them away from him, he wants to see their potential, and would be bored if they became goody two shoes hero’s.

But if it’s more trauma you want over all, I can do that! I like being a mean writer and torturing my Oc’s. Also if you’re interested and you have Wattpad, I have another Gotham series on there. There’s not as much written for that because I’ve been busy, but it’s in collaboration with one of my IRL friends Oc’s (I can link their AO3 account if you’re interested in that too, they have over a hundred chapters so you won’t get bored lol)

It’s closer to the comic book portrayal of the characters. And it focuses more on the hero side of things instead of the villains. The main focus is on the bat fam. My oc is Morrigan and his oc is Harley. So if you want more to read in the meantime while I get to writing, you could check those out!

Thanks for the ask Anon, love you <3

[thesublemon]

planning ≠ coherence

I talk a big game about liking coherence in art, and it’s probably clear that I have an apophenic tendency to enjoy textual interpretation. And this might lead people to think that I have a preference for carefully planned and plotted art, or that I look down on the messy and improvisational. But this is actually almost the opposite of the case. Not because I don’t really like coherence, but because artistic coherence is something more complicated than planning, and isn’t even necessarily possible to achieve with planning.

The thing about improvisation, is that at its best it’s about finding the choice that feels right. I listen to jazz more than any other kind of music, and one of the reasons I like it so much is the exhilaration of someone landing on a musical idea that simultaneously makes a song feel bigger and more complete. A solo isn’t fun if it’s just a bunch of disconnected ideas (similar to how whimsy isn’t fun if it doesn’t also “work”). It’s fun if it picks up on the things that the other players are doing, or ideas that showed up earlier in the song, and then makes them feel like they go together. Even if they “go together” in the sense of being coherently discordant, eg repeating ideas that don’t work multiple times. If beauty is fit, then the joy of improv is finding fit in unexpected places.

This goes for narrative too. In long-running stories like comics, book series, and TV shows, much is often made about whether certain choices were planned from the beginning. If things were planned, that’s a reason for praise, and if things weren’t planned, that’s a reason for derision, either towards the showrunners or towards people attempting to interpret the work. Say, “This plot point only happened because an actor wanted to leave the show. Therefore it has no meaning to read into.” But making things up as one goes is not what makes a story lose its plot, so to speak. Making things up is only a problem if the things the artist makes up don’t go with what came before.

In Impro, a very excellent book about the craft of improvisation, Keith Johnstone calls this process of making-things-go-with-what-came-before “re-incorporation”:

The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future. His story can take him anywhere, but he must still ‘balance’ it, and give it shape, by remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them.

Johnstone is big on the idea that satisfying narrative depends on a sense of structure, and that reincorporation is one of the most important tactics for creating structure. To paraphrase him, a story where a character runs away from a bear, swims across lake, and finds a woman in a cabin on the other side, and “makes passionate love” to her has no structure. It’s just a series of events. Whereas if the bear then knocks the cabin’s door down and the woman cries out that it’s her lover, then suddenly it feels like a story. Because not only has the bear been reincorporated, it has been linked to the woman. From this perspective, if a story has no sense of reincorporation, or new developments don’t make sense with what came before, then it will feel incoherent, no matter how planned out it was.

I also keep thinking about Paul Bouissac’s discussion of gags and narrative in The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning. He explains that what makes a scene funny is not whether it strings a bunch of gags together, but how those gags are organized. To use an example from the book, it’s one thing for a clown to pretend to hurt its thumb, and ask for an audience member to kiss it. It’s another thing for it to keep hurting different parts and then finally hurt its groin and act scandalized at the idea that someone might kiss it. Bouissac calls this sort of repetition “anaphor”:

Anaphor is one of the main tools of textual consistency. In linguistics, it designates the use of pronouns or any other indexical units to refer back to another word or phrase in the text. It links together parts of sentences and bridges the grammatical gaps between clauses, which is a consequence of the linearity of language. In rhetoric, anaphors are repetitions of words or structures that build up the cohesion of discourse and create momentum toward a climax. In multimodal communication, words, gestures, objects, or musical tunes can play the same role by reminding the receiver—that is, the spectator in the case of a performance—of signs and events produced earlier in the act.

One of the things that fascinated me about Farscape as a teenager, was that in contrast to other scifi of the time, it made no pretenses of having been planned—unlike say, Babylon 5. Or even shows like The X-Files, Lost, or Battlestar Galactica that gave you the “feeling” of a plan whether or not they had one, or were capable of following through. Farscape felt incredibly coherent, both in terms of theme and plot, but this coherence came about purely on the strength of the writing’s ability to ideate and then reincorporate. It would take someone’s weird costume idea, like the villain having glowing rods that screw inside his head, and snowball that into a whole storyline where the villain is a half breed of one hot-blooded race and one cold-blooded race, and can only stay alive by thermo-regulating the inside of his brain. And then decide that his vendetta against the hot-blooded race has motivated his obsession with the protagonist since the first season. Yet these twists never feel like “ret-conning” in a pejorative sense, because it all feels narratively and thematically sensible. (Unsurprisingly, making the show was described as “more like improv jazz than plotting out a symphony”).

None of which is to say that I dislike planning or polish, either. Stephen King, as a so-called “discovery” writer, famously writes off the cuff, without outlines. As he puts it in On Writing:

You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer—my answer, anyway—is nowhere. I won’t try to convince you that I’ve never plotted any more than I’d try to convince you that I’ve never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible. I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. It’s best that I be as clear about this as I can—I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course).

But his best stories feel like whatever bloat might have been generated from this narrative improvisation has then been pared down to what that improvisation was really getting at. And I can’t lie, I get a particular joy from reading or watching something and feeling without a doubt that the artist is in complete control of my experience. It was one of the most gratifying aspects of rewatching The Wire recently: the feeling that the little meanings and foreshadowings I was seeing in each choice were almost certainly intended. Nothing is more satisfying to an apopheniac than feeling like the patterns you see are actually real. And nothing is more annoying than a story that tries to pull some sort of reveal on you (“Dan is gossip girl!” “Angel is Twilight!” “Rey is a Palpatine!”) that doesn’t make any sense because it wasn’t intended from the beginning. Just because those characters existed in the story before, doesn’t make it good reincorporation. So if a story is a story because of structure, then if the choice is between a planned structure and no structure, the former is almost certainly going to be better.

Point is, it’s not really the process that matters. All creativity is improvisational in a sense, because all creativity involves making things up. What matters is how dedicated an artist is to the integrity of their work. If a writer has carefully planned their whole story out, with every twist and every theme clearly in mind, but can’t adapt if they start writing and find out that something they planned doesn’t actually work, that’s one kind of failure mode. The narrative equivalent of designing a perfect castle and then building it on a swamp. On the other hand, if a writer tries to go with the flow, but can’t reincorporate that flow, then that will be another failure mode. To the extent that I respond to improvisational art, it’s because improvisational art is often more attuned to these questions of whether something is moment-to-moment right. But what matters, above all, is the rightness. That’s what defines coherence. Whether there is a sense in the work that it is oriented around something, and whether the choices contribute to that something.