#man i used to read fic on lj like i've been Around i don't know what the Trend is atm and that sounds so ridiculous lol

[lookedlikethebins]

not to sound Out of Touch but is Reader preference now a full fic posted on tumblr (w/ read more ofc) rather than posting a link to the full thing on ao3? realizing i have some fics (some of my favorites actually!) that are only on tumblr as a link out ao3 post.. is there a Need to post everything on here in full (too)??

[zahri-melitor]

Hi! How and when did you get into DC comics?

Well my original entry to DC was that I was a fan of Lois & Clark: the New Adventures of Superman when I was a kid and it was originally showing. This actually was a decent entrypoint to the DC mythos, as it's famous for having probably the best TV-comics synergy of all time: the Death of Superman was written to have a plot running while Lois & Clark built up to the wedding, so they could do simultaneous weddings in the comics and the show.

It worked out pretty well for DC.

But DC Comics, as comic books? Well somewhere around 2006 or so I'd transitioned into reading some fic for Lois & Clark, as a change. I then moved on to stories about Bruce/Selina (which I had a reasonable amount of background for from the Burton & Schumacher movies), and ended up in the scans_daily scene on LJ. This was the heyday of scans_daily, when you could pretty reasonably follow along a lot of major comics via the 1/3 posting rule; you didn't get everything, but that plus the summary got you across events pretty well.

I'd liked Barbara Gordon as a little girl, watching the movies. It was at this point I discovered Oracle.

The first comics graphic novel I ever purchased was Birds of Prey: Perfect Pitch. I've still got it. I ended up reading a bunch of runs recommended via content I liked on scans_daily: Birds of Prey, Robin, No Man's Land, Nightwing, Batgirl 2000, Blue Beetle, and Young Justice. A couple of these I was buying trades for (BoP and Blue Beetle); the rest I was reading via ye olde torrent packets. I was also reading and collecting a bunch of Vertigo titles: The Sandman, Fables, Y: the Last Man, and one or two Marvel titles (Runaways and Power Pack).

I dropped out of DC fandom, like so many others, around 2010-2011. It was actually prior to n52 in my case: I wasn't enjoying Batman Reborn, they'd cancelled my two favourite books (Birds of Prey and Blue Beetle), but the last straw was probably when they murdered Lian Harper.

I noped out. And it was a pretty good call on my part, given that n52 was barrelling down anyway.

I was still occasionally dipping in to read fic, mostly about characters I particularly cared about, but every time I took a breath and paid attention to gossip about what was currently happening in comics, it was mostly terrible news (Lian was still dead; people told me Roy's personality had been obliterated; Barbara was Batgirl and magically healed; the universe resets sucked and everyone hated them; Jason was somehow still alive; everyone was mad about something that had happened to Dick; etc etc)

It was during 2022, when I don't even know how I came across it, but I discovered that DC had finally reprinted Young Justice in trade. This was huge; collections had refused to do this during the 2000s aside from a trade of Sins of Youth back when it came out. There was a general attitude that the group of largely younger and largely female fans weren't worth catering to. The fact that DC now saw us as a lucrative market suggested to me that my contemporaries were finally getting their chance to start running the asylum.

So I dipped back into the community. It was a little hard at first, because hubs had changed, and locating fans who liked the things I personally liked took a little while. But I got back into the fandom, and got back into the fic, and discovered that back in about 2017 there'd been a revival to start reprinting a lot of my favourite comics runs, and that DCUI was the best way to read comics these days, and I could get access to it in Australia.

And because DCUI was just so much better than the methods of reading comics I'd been dealing with 15 years previously, and I'd had an idea for a story I wanted to write, I started a canon read through review, starting all the way back in ALPOD with Tim's earliest comics.

And here I am. I often have older opinions on things simply because I remember being in these debates 15+ years ago, and then I missed the intervening period, so my opinions never updated or heard the changed details (or are only slowly doing so now). I'm a preboot girl at heart because that's where I fell in love with various characters. I, like every other Batfan with a similar history to mine (and there are a lot of us) went through that moment of sheer bemusement over the Tim & Jason tag at AO3 as my most prominent memory of their relationship was Tim kicking Jason in the nuts.

And I've bought a lot of trades ever since getting back into the fandom, because I can't lose access to them AND they're just so far superior for collection purposes than floppies.