#chariots chariots

[bluef00t]

poll makers: reblog for larger sample size :) the more votes the more reliable result

poll rebloggers: my psionic warriors. hopelessly bias this poll to my will immediately

[mxanigel]

10 fandoms / 10 characters / 10 tags

Thanks for tagging me, @queenaeducan <3

1) Mass Effect -- Vetra Nyx 2) Dragon Age -- Cassandra Pentaghast 3) Tales of Vesperia -- Yuri Lowell 4) Trails series -- Lloyd Bannings 5) How to Train Your Dragon -- Toothless 6) Portal 2 -- Cave Johnson 7) The Legend of Korra -- Korra 8) The Mummy -- Rick O'Connell 9) 86 -- Vladilena "Lena" Milizé 10) Star Wars -- Mara Jade (SHE COUNTS OKAY)

No-pressure tagging @poetikat, @lazyadmiral, @milesmentis, @mxkelsifer, @fairfaxleasee, @saraptor, @sheplaysrpgs, @islanddryad, @spindleweedss, @deedeemactir

[bluef00t]

Among the perpetual They Might Be Gay LOL posting or jokes about how [X song] said Gay Rights, I do wonder. Are people aware of who the Pink Album is dedicated to and why

[bluef00t]

hello to the person next to me at Woodstock who saw my minizine and was like "woah! I follow you on Tumblr"

[bluef00t]

whys the foot blue

Good question. I used to think it had to do with grape treading, but I'm now told it has something to do with falconry.

[bluef00t]

read FMA and have become fully fascinated by Van Hohenheim. Genuinely has there ever been a better immortal character. His combination of invulnerability & low self esteem means he has about zero self-preservation instinct and will just let people knock him flat including his own 15 year old son.

His entire deal is that he became superpowerful by convincing 500000 ghosts to talk about their feelings but he's too nervous to talk to his own two sons because he thinks they don't like him. Which to be fair, they do not. but cmon dude.

[bluef00t]

one of my strongest potentially old-fogey opinions about current "fancams" trends is that making fan videos of musicians set to music they did not actually work on is just hilariously disrespectful

[bluef00t]

heyy, you said a bit ago that you’d been reading comics but weren’t posting about them because they weren’t superhero comics, but I’d be interested in hearing about them, if you’d like to share

This post got LONG because yes, I LOVE talking about comics, thank you for asking :)

Let me start with a list of good titles and get into my thoughts more under the cut: R.U.R., Terrarium In Drawer, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Parable of the Sower, Watchmen, Parenthesis, and The Nice House On The Lake.

Starting out with the realization that I never posted my MICE haul to Tumblr, because my favorite read of the year so far was from that:

R.U.R. (drawn by Kateřina Čupová) is well-executed and SO well-aligned with my interests that it's crazy. It's an adaptation of the 1920s play which I somehow still haven't read, and it's just… robots, foundational vintage sci-fi, supply-chain parables, cleverly deployed stageplay metaphors, doomed tower defense scenarios, "simplistic" eurocomic styles that carry massive amounts of emotion, gorgeously bold CMY watercolors with strong color symbolism—everything. My copy is a misprint (two pages are duplicated, though I don't think anything is missing) and it's too bad that the English translation uses a machine-typed font where I suspect the original dialogue was handwritten, but those are small quibbles. Some day I'll read the play to compare/contrast; the logic of text-story-to-comic adaptations always fascinates me.

Since I began typing up this ask, though, I read something which takes a close second place: Terrarium In A Drawer, by Ryoko Kui. Really effectively Twilight-Zone-y little anthology in a variety of styles (both visually and subject-wise). It's often unclear going into a story how you're going to feel by the last page: is there a joke punchline coming? A surprisingly astute, perspective-changing observation? A deeply unsettling, unanswerable question about being alive? Most stories have all three, in some order or another. God, I love Ryoko Kui—she's maybe the ONLY author to successfully convince me that fantasy has certain merits over science fiction when it comes to looking at the world, not just as escapism.

I also, with the release of the second book, got around to My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. There's a very established American Literary Graphic Novel Topic: "precocious gay(/disabled/ethnic) coming-of-age in the 60s(/70s/80s) filtered through escapism into mass media and obsession with the Holocaust(/war/sexual/family) traumas of a previous generation who would rather repress all that". (Maus, Fun Home, and two other books I read called I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together and Victory Parade fit in here as well.) So the plot is "transgressive" in a very familiar way, but that cluster of topics does remain consistently interesting to me. And honestly, I wasn't reading it for the PLOT. The artwork, the integration of famous paintings and pulp cover motifs, is crazy: it reminded me of the forms of Chris Van Allsburg and the color crosshatch of Melanie Gillman, both turned up to 11. The format isn't conventionally comic-y, but the text and image were still inextricable in a way that felt intuitive to me. Without panels, the text walks you through landscapes.

I re-read Parenthesis and read Crazy Like A Fox and the unrelated A Fox In My Brain, which are members of another Adult Graphic Novel subcluster—brain-illness educational autobio. Parentheses, about a cognition-disrupting tumor, was my favorite; it was originally published in French, so my BD bias may be showing.

Parable of the Sower knocked me off balance by being the most brutal graphic novel I've read in a WHILE. I knew Octavia Butler from Bloodchild and Kindred, so I was expecting something messed up, just, holy shit. I should have read the original book back when I was a teenager; it would have changed my brain chemistry and fed my little false prophet complex. The translation to a "comic" felt a little clunky, with dense and not very well integrated chunks of text—it was more "illustrated" than anything but I did like having faces to match with names.

Watchmen, which I already posted a bit about on my superhero comics blog (and probably will more later) was a surprise in the opposite direction. I'd heard a lot about it being super brutal and cynical and deconstructive, but, uh, after reading Moore's Miracleman [ACTUALLY INSANE] I found it merely "noir" and maybe despondently neolib by comparison. It probably has as much in common with Tom Strong, Moore's most optimistic genre loveletter, as it does with Miracleman.

Oh, and I read Where The Body Was. It was fine. I like whodunits, but the payoff didn't make me kick myself in a really satisfying way, and the framing and art was all very normal modern American comic. I blame The Nice House On The Lake a couple years back for raising my expectations about things that look like that. Which, hey, speaking of which, apparently there's a second series being published now, The Nice House By The Sea! Putting that on the reading list now, right behind Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky when that hold comes in…