Food and cat
Today we went to the Good Food and Wine Festival. Purchase highlight: shiitake mushroom chutney. It’s really good.
Last night I randomly remembered a cute little DOS game about a cat that I played whenever I visited some of my parents’ friends. I played it obsessively while I was there, and was always miffed when it was time to leave. Now, thanks to the awesome power of the Internets and a DOS emulator called dosbox, I can play Alley Cat as much as I want in the comfort of my own home. In the interests of ensuring that everyone else wastes as much time as I know I will, I heartily recommend this game. The download is about 32k.
The most beautiful porcelain dolls in the world
If you haven’t seen Marina Bychkova’s hand-crafted porcelain dolls yet, I think you should go and have a look now. Your life is incomplete. 
My favourites are the Imperial Concubine and Princess Swan.
Why I don’t like mainstream superhero comics
I read When Fangirls Attack. It’s a blog which aggregates posts relating to women in comics from the wider internet. This could encompass a broad range of issues and viewpoints, and occasionally something unusual shows up, but mostly it ends up being a lot of posts by women (and sometimes men) complaining about the portrayal of women in superhero comics. Or posts by scoffing men complaining about women complaining about the portrayal of women in superhero comics, followed by posts criticising the hecklers.
I think the complaints of the women are mostly justified, and I agree with many of their observations, but I find that I can’t get too worked up over the issue because — while there are many, many comics that I like — I don’t really like mainstream superhero comics.
The reason I don’t like superhero comics has nothing to do with their portrayal of women. I have problems with the genre which I think are much less easily fixable, because they are fundamental assumptions and conventions on which the genre is built.
The Science is Silly
Back in the dawn of comic history, the awful pseudoscientific, semi-mystical gimmicks that gave superheroes and supervillains their super powers were not as blatantly stupid as they are to us today. Classic science fiction also had some terrible science. The difference is that whereas science fiction has moved with the times, and nobody would write a story about a magical shrinking ray today (and expect it to be treated as hard SF, anyway), comics have faithfully maintained the same standard of “science” that they had in the 1930s. I find it very difficult to take magical, glowing alien gemstones, colourful energy rays and “radioactivity” completely unlike actual radioactivity seriously. It blows my suspension of disbelief.
No Ripples in the Pond
An assumption that most superhero comics make is that the world the superheros inhabit is our modern world, mostly unchanged. While the superheroes foil elaborate and unlikely plans constructed by heinous supervillains, they have no significant impact on real-world issues. They don’t get involved in world politics or wars. They mostly don’t get involved in local politics either — and if there is some storyline that addresses anti-mutant political movements or superhero registration acts, you can be sure that when it has concluded the magical red reset button will be pressed and everything will get back to normal. No matter what superheroes do, the ordinary people of the world will continue wearing the same clothes, listening to the same music and making the same smalltalk as ordinary people in the real world.
This might have worked back in the day, when each comicbook storyline had a handful of heroes and a handful of villains, in the entire world, and you could plausibly assume that their adventures did not make many waves outside the city in which they operated. In the modern Marvel and DC universes, where you can’t throw a brick without hitting a super-person? Not so much. It’s ridiculously unrealistic. I don’t think it’s possible to treat these universes as anything other than near-future science fiction. You have to show the large-scale impact that these thousands of super-powered people are having on the world, otherwise the world makes no sense. You can’t have the JLA save the entire world from destruction every second week and not have anyone notice.
Crossovers Have Made a Mess
Part of the reason that these universes exist is that the two big publishers wanted all their heroes and villains to co-exist in the same world (and smaller publishers have followed suit). This has not only created the logically inconsistent setting described above, but because it was done retroactively, all these heroes don’t even have a sensible, unified source for their powers. All their individual origin stories have been smooshed together. What’s worse than one bad pseudoscientific gimmick? A hundred bad pseudoscientific gimmicks, which have no business all being true in the same world, all put together. So we have alien superheroes, radioactive-spider-bitten superheroes, genetically mutated superheroes, magical superheroes and mythological god-like superheroes all in the same setting. Boom goes my suspension of disbelief, repeatedly. Nobody even attempts to explain how all these (sometimes mutually exclusive) power sources interact — which is probably a good thing, because if they tried, it wouldn’t be pretty.
Starting from Scratch
It’s not impossible to get away from these problems and still have superhero comics. I recently read some stories that George R.R. Martin wrote for the Wildcards shared-world superhero setting (I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for these books). This setting was conceived as a world with many superheroes from the start, and it shows. There is a unified power source (an alien virus). The gimmick is made more realistic with the addition of some scientific plausibility (the virus killed the overwhelming majority of the people it infected; most survivors had completely useless and usually unpleasant mutations; only a tiny percentage got super-powers). Superheroes influence the politics and culture of the world (I don’t know to what extent this is true of the whole series, but one of GRRM’s stories heavily featured real-world politics).
Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s possible to fix the existing big-name comics. Their fans are too attached to the existing mythology, despite its silliness. (Just like I’m attached to Star Trek — a setting which has the same problems when it comes to science. I often wonder what Star Trek would look like today if the creators of The Next Generation had decided to “re-imagine” the franchise, Battlestar Galactica-style, instead of making their show a direct sequel to the original series and doing a lot of creative retconning.)
It looks like Marvel is trying to fix things by rebooting some of its storylines with the Ultimate imprint. I don’t know if they’re going far enough — they’re competing with their original storylines rather than replacing them, at least for the moment — but it’s a good start.
Dr Livingstone, I Presume
Every now and then I find one of those huge webcomic index sites and browse it looking for interesting new reading material. So I have some new links on the bottom right. And I have some other relatively recent additions I haven’t blogged about before:
A Softer World — photocollage one-shot comic. Deadpan humour. Sort of like Perry Bible Fellowship. A bit hit-and-miss — but when it’s good, it’s very good.
Edge the Devilhunter — this comic tackles many distasteful and downright offensive subjects, and a handful of panels actually portray people having sex, so don’t click on this at work or in front of your grandmother. I warned you. This is a very well-drawn comic — professional published comic quality. The hero is a young man brought back to life by the powers of Heaven and given the task of hunting demons who prey on the urban poor in a dystopian future. The interesting mythology and storylines sucked me in.
Elf Only Inn — this isn’t a new comic; it’s an old favourite which returned from hiatus last year sometime. The characters from the fantasy roleplaying chatroom are continuing their adventures in an MMORPG.
Purgatory Tower — criminals incarcerated in some kind of giant fantasy prison are given the chance to win their freedom by reaching the top of a mysterious tower which is much bigger on the inside than the outside. Everyone is some kind of furry, but it has so far been implied that there is some kind of magical process which binds humans to animals, so it’s not your usual furry setting. The art is full-colour and very good.
Sune — in a cyberpunk-meets-space-opera setting, the human sphere is run by nefarious corporations and humans are the galactic underdog following some kind of cataclysm. Weird gothy sex cultists, who are not really very nice people, fight against the corporations. Set against this backdrop are the interlinking stories of various interesting individuals.
The Non-Adventures of Wonderella — surreal superhero parody comic.
The Perry Bible Fellowship — bizarre three-panel one-shots. Frequently hilarious.
What Birds Know — a slow-paced but compelling fantasy story about three friends who go camping on a school assignment to pick mushrooms. Strange things begin to happen.
Wondermark — one-shots illustrated with old public domain art.
xkcd — geeky and philosophical humour, with stick figures.
ETA: I forgot Ever After — fairytale creatures captured by a Big Bad Wolf who is only supposed to hunt criminals are imprisoned in an asylum and experimented on by a mad scientist. Very good art.
ETA the second:
Wayfarer’s Moon — D&D-esque fantasy. Nice, full-colour art. There’s a mandrill-like warrior ape-man (but he dies D: )!
Precession — science fiction. Reminds me of Niven.
Free and Not Free Comics
Yesterday was Free Comic Book Day, which I celebrated at Outer Limits. Hodgestar and I hastily read some reviews of the free issues in the morning, so that we wouldn’t end up with something terrible. This is our loot:
- The Astounding Wolf-Man (my free comic) — the first issue of a series about a werewolf hero. Good art and writing, but nothing that fills me with a burning need to continue reading the series.
- Love and Capes (Hodgestar’s free comic) — a spoof about superheroes and the people in their lives. Entertaining.
- Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall — I ordered it. It arrived! It was good. It was nice to see many different artists illustrating the stories — especially James Jean, who normally does the fables covers.
- Ocean — I randomly got this because it was science fiction. It was good. It wasn’t very hard science fiction, but it wasn’t too squishy.
- Alice in Sunderland — I randomly got this because it was there, it was shiny and it was done by Bryan Talbot. It’s a sort of historical non-fiction book about Lewis Carroll’s influences and his links to the city of Sunderland, and miscellaneous Sunderland history through the ages. It was good. Very crunchy. Each page is full of interesting things; many are collages of photos, newspaper clippings, etc.
- Card and comic sleeves. But those aren’t very exciting.
Brief Spider-Man 3 Review
The good:
- Evil Strut Montage
- J. Jonah Jameson
- Amusing maître d’
- Venom’s giant teeth
The bad:
- Evil Eyeliner and Emo Hair
- Heinous plot devices
- Plot holes you can pilot an aircraft through
- Writers appear to believe that characters’ emotional development is not subject to logic, causality or common sense
- Two to three and a half (depending how you count) inadequately developed villains crammed into one movie
The ugly:
- Trite, cliched, colour-by-numbers dialogue camouflaged as deep and meaningful character development (I was expecting some, given the previous movie, but OMG, there was no end)
- Script appears to have been assembled by monkeys
I guess it’s worth seeing it at the cinema so you can watch people kick the crap out of each other in mid-air on the big screen. But only if it’s cheap.
I suck…
…not just because I haven’t updated in ages, but because I didn’t notice that I had a million comments awaiting moderation (something is broken in the notification system). Most of them were pharmaceutical spam, but there were some by actual humans. I’m sorry, humans, that I have been a bad blog administrator.
Since the last post, I have been on a trip to the wild, dangerous jungles of the Eastern Cape, where Hodgestar’s dad was celebrating his birthday. I will stop being lazy and upload the wildlife pics. Hodgestar and I have also decided to go to Poland sometime in August.
The real reason I’m posting is to put up this bookmarklet, which narrows the page body to 50% of the browser window. Why? So that you can read long bodies of text in plain, one-column html without the loooong lines: Racing stripe
Buy someone a cow
Recent Tweets
- @firstfallen I like option 4 too. Option two is also nice, but kind of busy.
- Twitter, you are making me sad in my pants. Fix your damn RSS feeds or stop linking to them. http://tinyurl.com/2apmyjv
- @AnnaMalczyk It wasn't hard -- wasn't actually using it for anything. Stupid LJ crossposting feature was final straw. Do not want! D:
- Or not so much. Now exploring these possibilities: http://tinyurl.com/382w9kg
- http://topsy.com FTW; actually seems to have access to full Twitter history.
- @TheRiver I'm following these instructions; don't know how "complete" this is: http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account
- I just nuked my Facebook account. When the boat anchor starts biting your ankles, it's time to let go.
- @firstfallen I don't think you're being oversensitive. Waiting would have cost little and been worth a lot. They chose to be dicks about it.
- @firstfallen They all deserve to be summoned to a compulsory team-building workshop on Christmas Eve. :P
- I think encasing the whole block in this tree would make the street look much better. Cut window and door holes. http://tinyurl.com/2vjhg3m
