coffee and ink

I am offering an original short story in the helptheproject auction. Minimum bid $1.

( 113: Children of the Damned )

( Supernatural 5x13: The Song Remains the Same )

( Fringe 2x15: Jacksonville )

helptheproject is a fandom auction to benefit the Virginia Avenue Project, a free afterschool arts and academics program in Los Angeles, California. 100% of participating children graduate from high school. 95% go on to college. 98% are the first person in their family to go.

I first heard of the Virginia Avenue Project a few years ago from my friend rachelmanija, who has volunteered as a mentor and stage manager for them for about fifteen years, and has often talked about working with the kids and seeing them grow up to suceed in their educations and careers. I have been impressed by her dedication to and delight in the work, and in the way the Project gives kids the confidence and support to learn new skills and attempt new projects.

I am not sure how I feel about Peter Gabriel's cover of "My Body Is A Cage".

( Spoilers )

I am in Barnes & Noble. I have taken the latest posthumous Darkover novel to the cafe because it is about Regis Hastur and, as I may have mentioned a time or twelve, Regis is my favorite. However, I will not be changing my stance on the posthumous Darkover novels, which is the stance of not reading them, because flipping through has revealed that Deborah Ross or the ghost notes of MZB have broken up the Danilo/Regis/Linnea OT3 in favor of the Danilo/Regis dyad. I do not approve! I mean, yes, obviously the love of Danilo and Regis is PURE and TRUE, I have thought so since I was nine, but I have also been accustomed to the Danilo/Regis/Linnea triad of love and child-raising since I was twelve, and I refuse to let it be broken now.

You are not canon to me, Hastur Lord! I unread you!

Admin
I'm letting my paid LJ membership lapse at the end of March because, as you can probably tell, I've switched my primary posting platform to DW. I will probably continue to cross-post and of course RSS feeds will always be available.

I've changed my journal default to unscreened to make commenting easier for anonymous and OpenID commenters, although I've had to disable this for some individual posts to prevent harassment. I may switch back to moderated comments in the future, if I receive too many harassing or spam comments; my patience for this is low. I will unscreen any comment that abides by my commenting policy, whether I agree with it or not.

The change to Dreamwidth is partly for personal reasons unrelated to LJ as a platform, but also partly because I am extremely unhappy with the decisions made about advertising, from the inclusion of fake antivirus ads to intrusive interstitial advertising for free accounts. It turns out that I can overlook most of the ethical outrages that have driven people to other services, because I don't expect any better from corporations, but when they start fucking with my user experience, it's time to go.

Personal
I'm probably not going to be attending any cons this year. I'll miss you, Wiscon peeps!

Happy birthday, yhlee!

ETA 1/25/10 @11:10am EST: The original title of the post was "Summary of recent discussions of manga in the comments of a mainstream comics blog," which I changed after receiving valid criticism.

GUY #1: Manga critics are much too nice and praise substandard work. Naturally, I feel no need to provide any evidence of this contention. Maybe it is because of all the girls.

GUY #2: Yeah, I don't like any manga. Even when it's good, it's made for girls. No, wait, I do like one manga -- it is by a man, and about stereotypical guy stuff. Since it is male, it is gender-neutral, unlike yaoi or shojo, which people only seem to like for political reasons. My reasons for liking things are completely apolitical and entirely justified by intellectual arguments. When women write in detail about relationships, it's just not aimed at me. When men write in detail about relationships, it shows complex emotional realism.

Also, why don't you ever talk about boys' comics?

GUY #2: Once again, I must assert that people are lying about their opinions of manga for political reasons, without evidence or example, and my list of all male great comics artists is completely without political bias. Also, I am going to cite Osamu Tezuka as a great comics artist, even though his career and oeuvre actually contradict everything else I've been claiming about audience and identification.

GUY #2: Wait, I haven't named enough great male comics artists yet.

I am going to continue to assume that girls' comics = comics about romance is such an obvious statement that it will inform all my thinking and yet never need to be clearly stated.

GUY #1: Whether situations are realistic, how intellectual they are, and how deeply invested the reader becomes in the story are totally objective metrics that are completely independent of all individual tastes and socio-cultural influences.

GUY #3: The problem is an age bias, not just a gender bias. To prove this, for the rest of this comment, I will only talk about comics written by men.

ETA: Thanks to trolling from IP address 69.70.187.234, I've put all anonymous comments on moderated status. For the record, this is a different IP from any of the people who have come over from the XxxHolic Roundtable to make arguments under their own names. Don't feed the troll. He's not worth the time.

I like the premise, but the development is slow -- Seven issues in, the reader has long been aware that Tom Taylor, the son of the writer of a bestselling series of fantasy novels, is in fact the novels' protagonist Tommy Taylor, come out of imagination to reality, and that the mysterious Lizzie Hexam is his best galpal Sue Silver, but Tom is still in denial and the plot movement is mostly spent on horror film slasher tropes, about which I could hardly care less. I do enjoy the bits of the fantasy novels we get -- they're obviously a take on J.K. Rowling, but I also see a bit of Alan Garner's influence; the opening of the first issue reminds me a lot of Elidor.

I am not entirely happy that the female writer's been masculinized for fiction and that Lizzie/Sue, shiny keen as she is, is secondary to the boy hero. Patterns o patterns. Women writers written out of history. I do get that changing the gender of a writer is a good way to signal that you're talking about the writer as cultural influence/product of culture rather than the writer as a person, but you know what else could signal that? Changing the gender of her protagonist.

I'm wondering now where the book boypal Peter is--my bet's that he's the cleancut villain who showed up recently, secret author (ha) of Tom's woes, but it's also possible he's the Loki-like rogue who accompanied him to jail.

The backstory issue about Rudyard Kipling's recruitment by and eventual rejection of an evil secret society is fine, although a little. Hmm. It's interesting what doesn't get mentioned, how the evils of imperialism are never demonstrated except maybe a single panel; you'd think the worst thing about imperialism is that sometimes it kills imperialists' children. There's one significant panel which brings up that the empire's "civilizing" mission is built on the backs of the colonized; maybe you are assumed to have it in mind all along.

I'm not certain how I feel about the genuinely shocking shock twist in Issue #8, and I'm not sure how coherent the overall take on the relationship between fantasy and reality is going to be. Fantasy is real when it comes to grown men who used to be boy heroes, but unreal when it comes to little girls who imagine themselves powerful magicians? I don't think my takeaway from that is exactly what it's intended to be.

Greek mythology as a soap opera among the down & out and rich & corrupt of contemporary London. I read the entire arc because I wanted to see how the myths would be reinterpreted, but approximately 75% of the women in the book are strippers, there are a lot of bare breasts above improbable waists, the exposition is painful, and there's not a single likable character. I'm not sure why Actual Furies and visions are brought in when other things like the "monster" Daedalus keeps in a maze is the secret that he's gay; there doesn't seem to be any logic to what remains magical and mystical and what is given a mundane explanation.

I guess if you like Greek myths for the violence, this might be your thing. Me, I also liked the grandeur.

Lots of POC and also I think white groups who count as ethnic minorities in the UK, which would be more of a plus if they weren't all criminals and psychos. In particular, Oedipus (who may also end up doubling for Orestes) is a 20-year-old black man with violent tendencies and poor impulse control who goes searching for the mother who left him to the foster care system when he was five; when he finds her, he accompanies her home for a one-night stand. After she discovers the barely literate note he was writing in his pocket and is appalled he didn't tell her who he was, he semi-accidentally stabs her. So the only times we see black women in this book they are (a) strippers; or (b) an irresponsible single mother who abandons her child to state care. The only black man we see is violent and sexually incontinent. Not so much seeing this as a win for multiculturalism.

In addition to the prominence of strippers (seriously, did Milligan OD on Frank Miller?), I'll note that Clytemnestra, here Lady Esther, the wife of a famed scholar and aristocrat, doesn't seek revenge for a murdered child (indeed, she seems less attached to her mad daughter Sandy [aka Cassandra and Electra] than her husband), but is bitter that her husband's affections are spent on strippers and call girls and offers to get reconstructive vaginal surgery in order to win back his attentions. In other words, the woman who ruled Mycenae and executed revenge for her daughter's murder becomes a woman without career or apparently any interest besides her husband and her terror of aging. I think Milligan's trying to pay attention to women in this series, but this mostly results in loving depiction of the injuries done them. When you end up giving women less agency and independence than a culture that literally counted them as property, you might want to put gender on your list of things to think about consciously in revisions.

Lovely fantasy debut, stylistically and to some extent thematically reminiscent of Patricia McKillip.

There is a city by a lake, which its founders built after they saw the perfect city in the lake; in one city stone tigers line the bridges and in the other, at night, the stone tigers walk. The prince, who is the heart of the King, who is the heart of the city, which is the heart of the kingdom, has disappeared, and soon the King follows after, leaving behind his bastard son Neill as de facto ruler to the accompaniment of rumors that make him responsible for the disappearances. (Just once, I would like the heart of the city which is the heart of the land to be in the slums.) In the quiet remote villages of the kingdom, first calves and goat kids are stillborn, then human babies. Timou, a young wizard and a wizard's daughter, sets off for the remote city, to discover the cause of the troubles in the land.

It all comes together a little too neatly at the end, the villainy is a little too predictable and circumscribed, and I missed McKillip's dry wit; I'm not sure I buy that the city in the lake is a truer, deeper reality, because an empty city seems to me to lack what makes city far more than buildings or bridges or tiger statues. But the delights of the language make up for it:

Timou was a child of winter, which in the villages, where most children are born in the spring like lambs, was worthy of some slight notice. A winter child: in the villages the phrase might also mean a young one more solemn than most, just as an apple-blossom child is a merry, laughing child and a harvest child is practical and motherly. Timou was a winter child in both senses: serious and quiet even in her cradle, which was an exotic object carved of rosewood and inlaid with the paler woods of apple and thorn.

( Spoilers for The City in the Lake and Kari Sperring's Living with Ghosts )

There is something really off about the integration of the rock songs into the soundtrack--it's too loud, too forward, something. It's really distracting and even the use of Florence and the Machine cannot make me happy about it.

( Spoilers! )

The number of white Europeans, Australians, and Canadians who think racism is a solved problem in their countries will never cease to amaze me.