Posts Tagged ‘comics’

MonkeyNet's newest hero team

Finally mining the dregs of the many varieties of possible animated Batman concepts,  MonkeyNet has announced its intent to produce a new Batman series scheduled for Fall 2009 targeted to 4 – 7  year-olds called Batman: The Brave and the Bird, wherin the Caped Crusader will be partnered with an actual talking robin named Drake.

MonkeyNet executives refused to take questions after making the short announcement.

Making:

I’m coding a nifty image doodad for the Monkey so I can use Flickr’s JSON feed capability to pull in a prettier and more custom-styled slideshow to replace the Picasa show that’s up now on the HM home page.

For Vegas After Midnight, I’m writing flavor text drafts for the characters representing the 16 face-cards, the 4 aces, and the Joker. It feels good to be focused on this again. I like how it is coming together under the Don’t Rest Your Head umbrella.

For Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, I’m sketching some very loose notes of custom bits to mix into the setting, so that once I find a group to play, we can put our own stamp on it. Basically, my scheme is to commandeer one of the minor Barathi houses, House Lupini, and flesh them out by blending in some cultural and societal bits I wrote up about the Raehalan (from Canon Puncture’s Sojourn 66 PTA series). I’ve made up a basic house sigil (see pic at left) that I’ll be sharing on the S7S wiki, and writing down some basic ideas as well. I don’t want to go too far with it until I can sit down with a whole play group and do some collaborative setting brainstorming. But it’s a fun exercise, and it’s actually helping unscrew my brain to let the VAM creativity flow. And the blogging ideas, too, for that matter.

Enjoying:

Not much of note going on in the TV-watching arena, except that I must say I am liking Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire quite a bit more than I expected to. Yes, it is juvenile, campy, and has moments where the humor falls flat. But it has provided me with as many moments of laugh-out loud entertainment as 30 Rock and The Office do, and I actually think the underlying storyline has a pretty sincere mythic feel to it. I don’t know this for sure, but the show feels to me like it is written and guided by people who actually understand fantasy and geekery, and I even suspect some of them are familiar with roleplaying games. The humor seems to be an homage rather than a satire. If the writers and actors are given a chance to get a feel for characters, I think the consistency will improve and this will emerge as a consistently enjoyable show. Although it probably helps to have a little Skyy (or your mild mood-enhancer of choice) in your system.

Reading:

Comics – I’m catching up on the last few issues of Northlanders, Green Arrow/Black Canary, and the first issue of Warren Ellis’ new steampunker, Ignition City. Northlanders rocks as always. GA/BC is nothing spectacular, but hey, they’re a couple of my favorite characters and their current exploits have me in a decent state of enjoyment.

Novels – I’m still marking time with the mildly palatable The Pirate Queen by Alan Gold until my name comes to the top of the library waiting lists for either Morgan’s The Steel Remains or Butcher’s Turn Coat. Or maybe I ought to go sell off some of my old books at Half-Price Books and maybe scratch up enough flow to buy my own copy of one of the titles I want.

Playing:

Not a darn thing lately. But I have to believe that’s about to change. Otherwise I’ll go crazy.

Another shareworthy laff-fest about our beloved PoTUS, discovered courtesy of a tweet from Mighty Mur Lafferty:

Obama Disappointed Cabinet Failed To Understand His Reference To ‘Savage Sword Of Conan’ #24 | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.

The excellent Storn Cook has been doing illustration on a fun sword-and-sorcery webcomic called Catspaw. I sez you should check it out.

Being the big, loyal Green Arrow – Black Canary fan that I am, I grabbed up a copy of the new Black Canary miniseries from DC, and lo and behold, the opening pages of issue #1 turned out to contain a cool, unexpected uber-treat.

Dinah is recounting the story of the first time she met Oliver Queen. They were in hero-mode working for the JLA, and they were in Las Vegas, protecting a Japanese politician from assassins. And as gloriously depicted by artist Paulo Siqueira on a spread across the top of page 2, the assassins, a whole big gang of 20 or so, are sporting various blades, nunchaku, bo staffs … and Elvis Presley costumes.

Green Arrow and Black Canary were battling on the Vegas Strip against a whole gang of Presleyans.

If you know me at all, you know how rockstar-cool that image is.

UPDATE: I just discovered that the spread I’m talking about is contained on pages 3-4 of the free PDF preview of Black Canary #1.

I was just doing that thing we blog-reading geeks do sometimes where we are reading a post on a blog and we follow a link to anther related blog and then we read that post and maybe a couple other posts on the linked site and we follow links on that site to some other posts on other sites and suddenly we’ve spent an hour discovering new stuff we didn’t know was out there. You know what I mean, right? There’s probably a “new media” name for this whole thing I’ve just described, but I don’t know of it. But I bet most blog-readers do it just the same.

Anyway, today I did that and I started following through some various threads dealing with topics related to feminist perspectives on pop culture, comics, etc.

And I feel totally, helplessly, hopelessly like crap.

I’m a privileged white guy who believes he is very liberal, very progressive, totally cool with alternative lifestyles and is as pro-women as it is possible for a privileged white guy in Western culture to be.

And that’s the problem. Apparently, it seems no matter how much I WANT to be the good guy, I’m still kinda filthy. Because I’m white, and a guy, and I read mainstream comics and I play roleplaying games and even though I think I’m against misogynist crap I still often subconsciously buy into stuff that objectifies and degrades women without even consciously noticing it most of the time. I let sexist stuff fly by all the time without calling anybody on it. And the stuff I DO notice, I sometimes rationalize away or excuse with a “they don’t know any better”.

Aw, I’m not making any sense. I guess I’m just saying that on days like this, when I allow myself to discover perspectives that kinda give me a reality-check, I find I’m not as far along the progressive track as I want to be.

But I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to stop reading comics. I agree that lots of women heroes are drawn with boobs that are ridiculous and curves that are unreal and costumes that are non-functional. I agree that in many cases women are treated as objects or plot points that do not actually have their own lives but actually just “affect” the true heroes, the men. But for all that, I love superheroes and comics. I don’t want to quit.

I’m a Batman fan, but I didn’t read the Batman maxi-series War Games. But, I did hear through the pop-culture grapevine after the arc was over about what happened with Stephanie Brown – a teenage girl who happened to be a hero known as the Spoiler. She was Tim Drake/Robin’s sometime girlfriend and eventually was taken in and trained by Batman, and she even became Robin for a short time before her gruesome assault and murder at the hands of a power drill wielded by a crap-ass Joker-ripoff villain named Black Mask. It seemed like an unfortunate and dumbass misuse of a character death just to amp up the drama, but other than thinking that, I originally let it pass me by. I didn’t read it myself, didn’t see the images the story used during Stephanie’s murder.

Well, later on I DID see some of the images, and they made me sick. Because it was right there. In several frames, as she was being tortured and killed, the artist drew her in sexually suggestive poses. Then I saw how this particular death scene was juxtaposed with the time in 1988 when the Joker killed Robin II, Jason Todd. When THAT happened, you saw nothing of the actual beating but the Joker grinning and Jason’s arm raised in self-defense.

Anyway, now the icing. Jason Todd’s death affected Batman massively, he has a memorial in the Batcave, and Batman has always considered it Batman’s fault that Jason died.

Stephanie has no memorial, DC comics editors are insistent that she’s not going to get one, and both characters in the story and DC Comics writers and editors have said that what happened to Stephanie was Stephanie’s own fault.

What the Frak? Whether this was conscious intentional misogyny or not, what are they thinking? What are people supposed to take away from this? What is the ethos or the creative agenda that DC is putting forward, conscious or not?

I’m at my wits’ end.

Read through these threads if you get some time and feel so inclined. I’ll try to do a better job of processing through my current emotions and maybe re-visit this later. But I’m kinda pissed off at DC right now.

5th Carnival of Feminist Science at 100 Little Dolls

Project Girl Wonder

Crap.

One of my favorite TV shows killed off another character, this time one that I really liked. I won’t say who and I won’t say what show, even, in case you haven’t seen it yet.

Double crap.

Dinah Lance, the Black Canary, is leaving the Birds of Prey. So one of my favorite comics characters is being written out of my favorite hero team book. Joy.

Look, story happens, I get that, and I support it. Characters die or disappear or leave town. If it makes sense to the tale, if it enriches it, then fine. But then there are these cases I’ve mentioned above, and I’m pretty sure neither one of them was done with the story foremost in the creators’ minds.

Expedience. Lazy writers who can’t figure out how to grow a story WITH a character, so they end the character and usually introduce some other schmuck in her/his place.

This isn’t real life. No one I care about actually died. I’ve got perspective, I know it’s a TV show and a comic book.

But I love story. And I honestly don’t believe the stories these characters were in were really done with them yet. I think it was expedience or laziness. Some suit somewhere said “do this” and some writer couldn’t figure out how to make it work within the story, so they do the drastic but easy thing and excise a great character.

We are not amused.