ingvild

I'm having a busy week with preparing for Japan and work, so naturally I took the time to get hooked on and read a new manga series, Buso(u) Renkin (by the same guy who did Rurouni Kenshin).

The plot is basically this: Boy sees girl about to be attacked by a monster, pushes her out of the way and gets stabbed through the heart. Girl puts ~~magic rock~~ alchemical device in his chest to act as a heart for him, and reveals that actually, she was just pretending to be helpless to lure the monster out, she's actually a kickass Alchemy Warrior. The alchemical devices, called kakugane, turn into weapons whose shape depend on the user's personality or something. The monsters are homunculi.

The words "alchemy" and "homunculi" are the only similarities with Fullmetal Alchemist. It's more like Bleach, only without the endlessly dragged out story arcs and fight scenes (it clocks in at ten volumes of manga and 26 anime episodes). The main character's power ups are also plot relevant and not a good thing.

Male lead and main character Kazuki is one of those idealistic sweethearts. Female lead Tokiko is awesome. And then there is Papillon.

Anyway, watching this show finally clued me in to why I took to Judau of Gundam ZZ immediately, but it took Kamille of Zeta Gundam so long to grow on me. I'm pretty much an omnivore when it comes to female characters - as long as she has agency and a personality, I don't actually care what the personality is. With male characters, I'm much more picky. Basically, I like two types: socially awkward/dorky and complete sweethearts (often also wide-eyed idealists). Judau, like Kazuki, falls in the second category.

I guess this is also why I prefer Superman to Batman, and Captain Marvel (him with the Power of Shazam) to them both (Superman is a Good Person, while Captain Marvel is both a Good Person and still keeps some of his innocence).

So I woke up with the strangest desire to write a Code Geass fic. Since it's set post-series, I'll put the general fic idea beneath spoiler text:

So Suzaku and Nina are fighting terrorists with her sort of being the Q to his James Bond, only he's angsty and dorky, not suave, and also, she and Nunnaly are the only ones who's supposed to know he's alive. They're trying to preserve the peace and keep Nunnaly from being overthrown and also kinda doing penance because let's face it, they have a lot to make up for. Somewhere along the line Suzaku realizes that he needs the help from someone who's as good in a Knightmare as himself so he recruits Kallen, who isn't exactly surprised he's alive ~~Spin!Zero!Zaku~~, but not all that happy about it, either.

I've never wanted to write in Code Geass fandom before, or read in it for that matter. It's just one of those shows I watched and was done with. I'm the same with Harry Potter. Read the books, don't need anything else.

This was the only thing I ever did for Princess Tutu. That show was just perfect the way it was, didn't need anything else.

I don't know what it is. If it was just the tightness of the plot, why aren't I all over Code Geass and Harry Potter? If it was about how many characters I love, why aren't I writing the heck out of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha? (There's even a ten-year time gap there!)

Why is it that Gundam Wing remains the one show I've had, and have, lots of ideas for? (And I mean lots.) The only ones that've come close to rivaling GW for me are X-Men and Elfquest, and really, I didn't write that much for them.

Obviously, how much room I think there is for stories is part of the reason, as is how involved I got with the world and the characters. But it can't be all. Maybe it's just my quirks.

I've thought that making a movie of Watchmen was a bad idea ever since I first heard about it. The comic is dense, heavy, and with several storylines - and a deconstruction of the superhero genre. I've argued that for it to be proper as a movie, it would have to be a deconstruction of the superhero movie genre - and that doesn't have enough history yet.

While the trailer looks awesome (for a comic fan - I don't know about the people who aren't familiar with the work), I'm still not sure I want to see it at a movie theatre.

However. If the rumors are true, and they really do include Tales of the Black Freighter as a cartoon and Under the Hood (Nite Owl 1's autobiography) as a documentary, I definitely want the DVD.

Take a look at this clip from the animated movie Street Fighter.

( Read more... )

If I had gone for an MA in literature instead of language, I know exactly what my thesis would have been about.

I would write about how the Arthurian myth has been reimagined in modern times.

The focus would be on Mists of Avalon, Camelot 3000, AKOTAS, the Babylon 5 episode A Late Delivery from Avalon, and these two Justice League (Unlimited) episodes.

Maybe I'll write it anyway.

Some time later.

This post contains spoilers for the end of Marvel's Civil War and Captain America #25. But I'm not actually going to talk about what happened, or the readership's reaction to it. I'm going to talk about spoilers.

( Read more... )

I wanted to write an entry about how the emotionally moving stuff hits us harder in comedy series because it's all the rarer...

...and relate this to why so many are tired of blood and gore in comic books.

I wanted to write an entry about how I, after having watched a lot of episodes of Scrubs in a row, start thinking in the structure of a TV show.

I wanted to ask why, exactly, so few white superheroes have brown eyes. (And related to that, how did Jubilee, who's Chinese-American, end up with blue eyes? Or am I just displaying my ignorance here, and that's actually not too unusual?)

Unfortunately, I have a week to finish a paper I have only just started on, and on Tuesday, my older sister comes to visit with all three kids.

This is what I get for pushing things ahead. I really should have done that paper instead of...watching Scrubs.

(I couldn't stop! It was funny!)

So I was reading

scans_daily and happened upon this post with Dr. Mid-Nite, the JSA's surgeon. As you may know, I have only recently begun my journey into DC comics, but JSA was one of my first purchases. I know Mid-Nite a little bit, but this was the first place I saw Mid-Nite-centric scans.

He's Norwegian.

I actually knew that already, because I made a comment over on kalinara's blog to the effect of "I'm glad there are no characters that offer the comic companies the chance to butcher a Norwegian accent". It was also the first time I expressed how ridiculous "Pieter Cross" is as a name of a Norwegian man. Seriously, no Norwegian word has /ie/ unless it's a noun ending in -i with a morphological suffix starting with -e (such as "lien").

Still, reading these scans, I realised why I like the fact that Dr. Mid-nite is Norwegian so much. He doesn't have ice/snow-based powers (unlike Ice and Icemaiden), and he's not a mythological/mythical person (unlike Thor and Ice). And unlike MOST characters whose first language isn't English, he doesn't butcher his supposed native tongue by inserting (often grammatically/pragmatically incorrect) words and phrases into his English speech, nor does he speak in an embarrassingly rendered "accent".** In fact, if he hadn't told Canary in these scans, there's no way of guessing that he's born in Norway - Trondheim, to be exact.

This made me think. I've been reading a number of blogs and forums when I should've been doing homework (procrastinating is a great talent of mine), and most of them have a theme. When Fangirls Attack and Girl Wonder focus on female readers, creators and characters in comics. One diverse comic book nation has the tagline exploring diversity in comic books. I've been watching the creation of the Ormes Society, a group for black female comic book creators, and it makes me wish I was one, so I could join.

What I am, however, is a nerdy Norwegian reader of comic books. And if I ever were to create a theme-based blog, it would probably be something like:

"How non-american characters are portrayed in US-based comics."

And since I'm sure there are people much better equipped to talk about the some of the downright horrible racism that came up during the Golden and Silver Ages, it means I could focus on non-american WHITE characters.

Which means I could just mutter "mystical ice-people by ASS, and... Queen Olaff!? Bwaaahaaahaaa!", and wonder why Nightcrawler can't speak his own language, and who the hell thought it would be a good idea to have an Australian character named Captain Boomerang.

**This is in fact the only thing I didn't like about X-Men Annual. Northstar uses more French here than he did in the entire first Alpha Flight run (at least it feels like that). So unless it's because he's talking to someone who understands his French (Rogue), and he's slipping into the habit of switching unconsciously between English and French, which I've read occurs among Montrealers, I'll be disappointed.

It's so weird when something ends.

I bought and read the last Lucifer trade today. I've been reading that comic over the space of about three years, and while I can't say that I've been waiting in breathless anticipation for each new book - the time stretch is too long for that - I've bought and read every new trade pretty much the moment they became available.

I didn't feel this way with Sandman and Starman, because I bought those over a much shorter time. When I finished Lucifer, I felt like something had changed. I would never get another trade of this series, and that made me feel a bit funny.

I wonder how I'll feel when Strangers in Paradise ends in three issues.

Current Mood: contemplative

I have no idea why I'm updating so often these days. Most likely it's because those of my friends who're still in Bergen haven't had their final exams yet, so I get a lot of time to just think about nothing.

Reading this at

puritybrown's blog got me thinking about the Norwegian word for comics/comic book/graphic novel/thingamajig: Tegneserie (nynorsk teikneserie). The more I thought about it, the more I realised that it's actually a pretty good word.

If I were to make a morphological analysis of this word, two alternative results would come.

1: It's a compound word, consisting of the verb tegne (draw) and serie (series).
A series that has been drawn, or a series of drawings.
This seems to be analogous to the term "sequential art", which in the blog post I linked to was deemed insufficient because it doesn't take into consideration the importance of the words.

This brings us neatly to the second analysis.
2: It's a compound word of the noun tegn (sign, letter) and serie (series) with a so-called fugue between to link them (in this case the letter e. Norwegian uses e and s as fugues. Look at the word barnebarnsbarn).
A series of letters/signs, presumably telling a story.

Combining these two definitions, we get A series of drawings and letters/signs telling a story.

And then we just add another word to indicate format.
Tegneseriestripe= comic strip
Tegneserieroman= graphic novel
Tegneseriealbum= a self-contained story which nonetheless often is part of a series, like the individual issues of Asterix.
Tegneserieblad= one issue of for example X-Men, or a small collection of strips. Sometimes a collection of ongoing stories from different series. This is the vaguest term, and ideally there should be a difference between the two. We're more likely to speak of an issue when one story/chapter of a story fills the entire thing.
Tegneseriebok= A hardcover collection of blader or strips.

"Comic book-like". It has become a word for something that's shallow and one-dimensional (at least in Norwegian). I always want to protest when I hear it, because it's so darned limiting. Comics are a medium, just like novels, plays, TV shows or movies. It has its own strenghts and its own faults. It is hardly only one genre. You have the comic book analogy to a Harlequin novel as well as its War and Peace.

I think I will comment on the rather unique nature of the comic book later. It seems to me like it's a mixture of novels/novellas/short stories and TV shows/movies, with a smatter of plays, written or on stage - this depends on the comic book. This could actually be a very interesting post, but I'll wait for a while.

You see, now I have to talk about quality. The thing is, although there are a lot of quality comic books, and some with great depth and nuances, there's also quite a lot of simple, shallow works. And unfortunately some of those books that tend to choose easy ways out are superhero comic books. I like superhero books, but I won't kid myself: With only a few exceptions, they aren't really what one would call high literature.

We have come to expect something from the superhero books. The heroes win. They don't kill (except Punisher, and he's an anti-hero anyway). Nobody stays dead except ~~Uncle Ben/Jason Todd/Bucky~~ um. Nobody stays dead. It's come so far that the inscription on Jean Grey's tombstone says "She will rise again". And moralising is perfectly acceptable. Nobody questions Professor X or other telepaths' right to enter somebody else's head. Mindwipe is perfectly okay. I don't know about you guys, but personally, if someone started talking in my head I'd freak out completely, because dammit, my thoughts are my own and I'll share them if I WANT to.

Most importantly, the status quo is not disturbed.

A lot of the time, I think that many of those who complain about Infinite Crisis/House of M/Civil War, the universe-shaking Events in DC and Marvel, only complain because they represent change. I might question methods and execution, but in the end, I think change is good. Stagnation is something that should be avoided. I don't want to be reading the same stories ten years from now as the ones I read five years ago. And while I wish that they hadn't taken away the mutation of most Marvel mutants, because I liked the new line introduced by Grant Morrison with loads of mutants, not all with useful mutations, and a living mutant subculture, I still think that good stories might come from it.

However, there are times when I wonder why I keep reading superhero comic books. I have no idea why I kept reading Uncanny X-Men throughout Chuck Austen's run, for example. Actually, I've become rather disillusioned with the entire X-Men franchise (except X-Factor), although I might have to buy Mike Carey's run when it's gathered in a trade. I like what I've seen there.

But when I read things like this I feel ashamed for continuing to support the industry.

For simplicity's sake, I'm only going to talk about Western comics and Western readers here. The Eastern market has a different picture.

Apparently, girls don't read comics.

Now, you can imagine that this came as a surprise for me. I've been reading comics pretty much since I learned how to read at age six. I started out with Winnie the Pooh and Bamse, went over to Donald Duck and moved on to strips. At thirteen, when I started going to ungdomsskolen (something like Junior High), I realised that my English sucked and, not being used to being bad at something scholarly, decided to rectify this by reading a lot of English. However, novels were a bit much, so I picked comic books - first Elfquest, then Sandman. I was sixteen when I saw the first X-Men movie and began reading superhero comic books. Yeah, I know, late bloomer, but they stopped translating X-Men comics to Norwegian sometime right about when I learned to read, any DC comics they might translate came only once in a blue moon, and I never really got into Spider-Man.

Sometime after I started reading at

scans_daily I first encountered the idea that girls don't read comics. It must have been a link somewhere or a discussion of sorts; I don't remember. However, this is apparently so widespread a notion that there are girls (and women) who read comics who feel the need to proclaim that they do so and yes, they are indeed female - as if this is something extraordinary (whereas I'm more "yeah, sure, of course - there are people who're actually suprised by this?"). There are people who refer females to other comics, because they can't possibly want to read superhero comics. There are people who think that superhero comic book readers who are female should just shut up about wanting female characters to be treated the same way as male characters, because they're just a tiny minority and who cares about them anyway?

I'm reminded of how my mother told me about borrowing her brothers' books because there were books for boys and books for girls back then, and the books for boys were infinitely more fun.

I've never encountered this attitude about female readers and (superhero) comics in real life. In fact, I'm having a hard time picturing anyone expressing such attitudes when not on the Internet. That's how alien it is to me. I mean, seriously: at least half of the people who work at Outland (aka my local comics shop) are women and the clientel is fairly equally divided. I think I, personally, know more girls who read comics than boys.

So I keep wondering: is this a continental difference (Europe vs. North America)? Is Scandinavia unique in having a large female comics readership? Or am I just oblivious, and shouldn't be reading comics because I'm a girl?

P.S: Check out When Fangirls Attack.

Current Mood: thoughtful

No, the title doesn't have anything to do with the content. I just wanted to write it.

After reading Ragnell and Kalinara talk about She-Hulk here and here , I decided to thumb through the Essential Savage She-Hulk when I saw it at Outland. One bit near the end jumped out at me:

The She-Hulk is fighting some guy in a mecha armor thing, pretty standard. But she accuses him of being a coward when he has to face her in person, and only being brave when someone/something else fights her for him. She says: "Me, I fight all my own battles - and that's why I always win!"

Right on, Shulkie.

No, I'm not letting go of this just yet. I just realized when the whole movie was soured for me. Spoilers behind the cut ( Read more... )

Allright, let's try this again, with better wording. Extremely spoilery. ( Read more... )

I had an interesting conversation with my sister this morning. It went something like this (most of it loosely translated from Norwegian):

Me: Have I made you read A Distant Soil yet?
Her: No.
Me: Do you have time to?
Her: Not really. What's it about?
Me: Um, er, everything? Uh, a spaceship, girl with psychic powers, an Arthurian knight, intrigue, shapeshifters...
Her: Science Fiction-Fantasy thing, then.
Me: Oh, and cop drama.
Her: Ha ha...Is that what I think it is?
Me: Well, there's a cop, and mystery...
Her: Oh, I thought you said something else.
Me: What?
Her: What do you think?
Me: Well, the only thing I can think of is 'cod drama', and that's...
Her: [Translating it] Torskedrama? Heh.
Me: What was it?
Her: Substitute 'p' for 'ck'.
Me: Oh.
Her: I thought "That's a new word for romance".
Me: Well, it's got that too.
Her: Huh.
Me: I'm totally going to start using that expression now.

In other news, my paper is limping along nicely (meaning it's a lot of work, but I think I'll manage), which is good, since the second draft is due this Tuesday. Once I'm done, I will make a mammoth post on how comic books work and don't work.

My first time as an instructor went pretty well, even though I would have preferred it if my little group could produce just a little bit more sound. Ah, well.

I've already mentioned Snakes on a Plane (SoaP). Incidentally, here are a few more interesting links:
Snakes on a Blog

snakes_in_a_fic

Now, I'm going to mention something I see all the time on

scans_daily: The Goddamn Batman. This is from Frank Miller's All Star Batman and Robin which, from what I've seen, isn't really very good. But this particular line is referenced again and again and again, paraphrased, photoshopped, generally done everything with. It's quite addictive.

Now, I was reading The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore which is a book of interviews done for Moore's fiftieth birthday in 2003. In it, they reprinted a number of pages including on from the British magazine Daredevils. The entire story was posted on

scans_daily and I was impressed then as well, but now I finally found out when it was first printed: in 1983. So now, when you read Grit, note the bottom caption box in the first panel, and marvel at Moore's psychic skills - or possibly Miller's repetition or predictiveness.

Enjoy.

It seems that my last entry was too long. I'll just add what I had to leave out here.

Scans for This Vicious Cabaret as well as the soundtrack: http://www.davidjonline.com/lyrics/vendetta.html

And the news that almost made me cry. Dammit, if there is one graphic novel that shouldn't be made into a movie, it's this one. http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=22841

I wonder why I couldn't make that other sort of link with those last two. They either didn't show up or gave me an error message. Go fig.

ETA: Dear fanfiction.net writers. Please ask for a V for Vendetta movie category. Don't lump your stories into the comicbook section. No love, me.

Anticipation for a certain movie has run high on the internet for a while. It has been referenced wildly. It has had a great number of icons made for it. Some have been convinced that it will be the awsomest [in internet lingo this is SO a word] thing ever, others that it will be stupider than a donkey who has just become professor of Stupid at an online university.

But enough about Snakes on a Plane. Time for me to talk about V for Vendetta. Spoilers within.

( Read more... )

It is rather fitting, I think, that right after I've ordered tickets for V for Vendetta I find wank for the same on fandom_wank.

V is a terrorist!

Just for the record? I think V is a terrorist. A person who creates fear in others in order to get his or her way is a terrorist. But that means that a number of people who we call "Freedom Fighters" are also terrorists. V attacks a corrupt and oppressive government, and avoids killing innocents. It's a question of desperate times = equal desperate measures. But I still prefer Evey's non-killing approach.

To quote Wolverine (of all people, but this was when he wasn't horribly overused) in Secret War: "Terrorists --! That's what the big army calls the little army!"

Nobody says that in mainstream comic books anymore.

In other news: Look! Look! I'm finally mastering HTML-formatting! Next point on the agenda: actually getting an icon. Or maybe an image post. Or learning how to link to one specific comment (see below).

Hmmm. Am I a terrorist if I terrorize the readers of my journal with this person's icon?

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ingvild

November 2020

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Entries tagged with comics

Da-da-da-da-da-daaaah!

Concerning fandoms

Heel-face...sort of

On female fighters getting hurt

Alternate Ingvild

To Spoil or Not to Spoil

Too little time

(no subject)

Endings

Tegneserie

Comics

Well, maybe not where you live

Whoop-a-doodle-poodle

Again about X3

X-Men 3, take two:

Misunderstandings

Internet fun

Part two

Movies

V for Vendetta