Wake the Sun

I said, way back in 2010, that Rice Boy was a beautiful comic but bad about female characters ('it's also needlessly, obviously lacking in women (and the, like, two that are there are stereotypes)'). I've been rereading the Overside stuff* because it's kind of a Big Deal in webcomics and I, dunno, felt like I should? Because I love webcomics and want to talk about them.

Anyway, my opinions on Rice Boy and Order of Tales (which I hadn't read before) haven't changed much - they're lovely and strange and... pointed, I guess? With strong central themes. And not great about women. Order of Tales' main (almost only) female character is a walking plot device - there's lip service about her not wanting to be taken any where, about wanting her own path, but in the end... I was ready to be really pissed about it. Or at least wearily disappointed.

ButI Instead! I moved on to Vattu (the story currently running) and holy shit, someone must have talked to the author, and/or he did some learning, because there are women flipping everywhere. The protagonist, the titular character, is a girl! There are women who are fighters, priestesses, princesses, chemists, toymakers, members of a secret society, who are well rounded, distinct, with full character arcs... ugh.

Vattu is an excellent comic in other ways as well - it's about empires and expansionism and colonialism, about questioning authority and tradition, and, mmm finding and keeping ahold of yourself, maybe? Anyway. You don't need to read the other Overside stories to read Vattu and, while it's on-going, there are 422 pages to read before you're caught up. You should read it!


* Overside is a world - a storytelling device, really - created by Evan Dahm. A bunch of stories, including Rice Boy, The Order of Tales, and Vattu are set there. It's published as a webcomic.

Spoilers under the cuts!

( Gunnerkrigg Court )

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( Sanctuary )

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( Once Upon A Time )

I've skipped a couple weeks and people keep posting things, so this is a long one. Fair warning!

* First out of the bag, #yesGayYA. For those who haven't read it, he original post by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith is here: Authors Say Agents Try to “Straighten” Gay Characters in YA. cleolinda has the best/most exhaustive coverage I've seen and coffeeandink has a good roundup of pertinent links.

* Related posts not mentioned above include swan_tower's Followup on "Say Yes to Gay YA" and bookshop's YA Publishing & the de-gaying of books.

* Speaking of co-written YA books, while I was typing this up Justine Larbalesteir and Sarah Rees Brennan announced one of their own! It's apparently about girls and female friendship and vampires and it's got a girl of color smack dab in the middle of the cover. I am excite.

Moving on:

( Links about food )

( Links about US politics )

( Links about interesting things )

( Pretty pictures )

ETA: For The Next Few Days, Portal Is Free! For the computer, and you have to sign up for Steam to get it, but still. Sweet beans.

* Amina, of A Gay Girl in Damascus, has been reported missing (possibly/probably abducted) on her blog. There's weird stuff re: her existence going around the blogosphere (glass_icarus has more on that), but I'm sticking to reserving judgment and hoping she makes it through okay.

* Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood: When I think of the poverty-stricken, sexually and physically abused, self-loathing Native American teenager that I was, I can only wish, immodestly, that I’d been given the opportunity to read “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.” Or Laurie Halse Anderson’s “Speak.” Or Chris Lynch’s “Inexusable.” Or any of the books that Ms. Gurdon believes to be irredeemable. I can’t speak for other writers, but I think I wrote my YA novel as a way of speaking to my younger, irredeemable self.

* On Colorlines: The Ultimate 21st Century People of Color Sci-Fi List

* The Andrew Loomis figure drawing books are back in print *____*

* Internet Archive becomes archive of physical books, too. The Internet Archive, alarmed to see that many libraries discard books after they are digitized, has decided to start collecting copies of every book ever published, cataloging and storing them in modified shipping containers that serve as long-term archival storage. The stored print-books are to serve as canonical references for the digitized editions.

* They've added two new elements to the periodic table!

* The first volume of The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal is up on Kickstarter

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* ladiesbigbang is open for signups!

* scifi_fest is also open for signups.

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On X-men: First Class*:

* The Quintessential Mutants of America and Mutie Go Home by Ta-Nehisi Coates

* Race and Women in X-Men: First Class on The Mary Sue

* marina wrote an essay about Erik as a Holocaust survivor. She's also got links to two other great posts.

* ETA: the Racialicious roundtable

* Which I saw Tuesday night and, well. These essays made me care more about the movie than the movie did. ALSO: Armando/Alex 4EVAR. If comics!Armando can come back from the dead (like every other X-Men, ever), movie!Armando can do it too.

On the DCNu:

* The good - Static's getting his own title! Also John Stewart and Guy Gardner are getting a buddy book. I usually don't care about the Lanterns, but this could be amazing.

* The ambivalent - Jaime's getting his own book. Which is awesome! Except it's a reboot and the original was so fantastic (and so recent, DC, c'mon) that I'm worried this new version won't stand up.

* The bad - they're knocking Barbara Gordon back to Batgirl - no more Oracle, no more wheelchair and, while the Birds of Prey still exist, chances are good she's not in charge**. In fact, all the news coming out of Gotham (except maybe Batwoman) sounds messed up - musefool talks about it here better than I could.

** I'm holding out hope for a Babs who's PwD and Batgirl and secretly Oracle and in charge of All The Things, but I don't think DC likes happiness that much.

Things I'm reading:

I'm still working on my To-Read pile - I finished Charitable Getting, but the review wants to be either one sentence ('I love this book but it's really, really white') or a multi-page academic analysis, so I'm sitting on it until it settles. I'm currently on A Princess of Roumania.

I've also recently finished the first volumes of Chew, The Invisibles, iZombie, and Persepolis, along with American Born Chinese, Skim, and The Vesuvius Club. Yay, comics!

I may or may not have bought another three books at Half Price over the weekend.


Things I'm Watching:

Fringe! Roommate D is a big fan and watching season 3 with her has finally convinced me to go back and watch season 1 (Abrams has burned me before). I'm on episode 14 and it's fantastic. All of the love for this bizarre little gem of a show <3.

Doctor Who, obviously. The new season has been awesome and creepy and awesome and creepy so far, I'm so glad my show is back on my TV.

Tiger & Bunny, which is an anime about a reality TV show about superheroes. It's like someone made a list of my favorite things and checked them off one by one - reluctant partners with homoerotic subtext, a diverse cast, explicitly queer characters, well rounded women, wacky hijinks, commentary on the media, celebrity, and the shaping of identity, and general ridiculousness.

It's not perfect - it's barely passed the bechdel test, dispute having four women in the main cast, and I'm still waiting to see if Fire Emblem (a queer black man) will allowed to be more than 'the flamboyant gay one'. There's hints that he's 'the one who owns his own company and sponsors himself and can do whatever the fuck he wants, including being flamboyantly gay and a respected superhero' and I hope they continue in that direction.

Sekai Ichi Hatsukoi - there's a fun story here, buried under the stupid tropes and sexual assault, and I enjoy the look inside the manga industry. Unfortunately it's... buried under stupid tropes and sexual assault. I'm kind of rewriting it in my head while I watch, we'll see how long I can keep it up.

I'm way behind on Community, Wandering Son and Sanctuary, woe.


Three Weeks for Dreamwidth:

I want to do something but I don't have any ideas. If there's anything you've ever wanted me to talk about - food, books, movies, Dallas, college, miniature horses, art, religion, whales, doujinshi, music, queerness, whatever - let me know!


SciFi Fest

The resource post for scifi_fest went up yesterday, chock full of science blogs, articles about space battles and examples of science fiction in fanfic. Only 10 days until prompting starts, I am excite.

* If you want to keep on top of the protests in Africa & the Middle East, the quake in New Zealand, and the Union Strikes in Wisconsin, politics is the place to be (I'm assuming you already know about Al Jazeera and The Guardian). The folks over there are fantastic.

* Mother Jones continues in it's excellent current events primer series with What's Happening in Wisconsin Explained and What's Happening in Libya Explained.

* Dwayne McDuffie, founder of Milestone Comics, writer, and creator of beloved canons, has died. Comics (and the world) is poorer for the loss.

And a couple videos off my Google Reader:

( Janelle gets to be outside the cut. )

You guys, you guys, you guys. The video promo for the possible Blue Beetle tv show's hit the net and I think my heart exploded.

I've talked about Blue Beetle before but to reiterate: we're talking about a series with a Hispanic majority cast, including our hero, his family, and half his friends. We're talking multiple amazing female characters (a quick mental headcount puts them at 50%ish of the main cast) including Traci 13 - sorceress, British born Chinese, Jaime's girlfriend and light of my life. We're talking about a series that's rooted in community, in how important support systems are and how, despite his spiffy magical bug suit, our Hero can't do this alone.

Can they fuck this? Yes. They probably will, I'm not gonna lie to myself about that. But right now I've got just over a minute of Jaime and Khaji Da being awesome (and a glimpse of an aged up Milagro? The hell?) and the potential has me giddy.

And even if it sucks, maybe they'll be enough interest that they'll restart the comic.

/flail

* The Last Airbender opens on the 5th. ssj10 lays out why you shouldn't see it: If you pay for this movie, knowing full well why its cast and its production are racist and problematic, then you are actively, in good conscience, supporting institutionalized racism. Period.

* Related: Racialicious' Of Hollywood and 'the American People': How the status quo is maintained and The Hathor Legacy's classic Why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass the Bechdel test.

* In comics news, DC's been killing off or otherwise sidelining heroes of color in favor of white characters. And they're being assholes when confronted about it. Racialicious talks about it here and >here and A. Lee Martinez takes a whack at it here. Now with bonus misogyny.

* There's an active conversation about scans/scanslations over in the manga blogosphere - Erica Friedman has The Solution to the Scanslation Solution (crossposted to Hooded Utilitarian) and Jake Forbes has Dear Manga, You Are Broken and Dear Manga, a Postscript. Some of you might have noticed that MangaFox was asked to take down the licensed properties on their site and complied - chances are good OneManga and other distribution sites will follow.

* On the NYTimes - In Nigeria, Oil Spills are a Longtime Scourge: The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates. The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are long since lifeless.

* Discussion about the current round of Racefail is still going strong - amazonziti's original links+ discussion post reached it's LJ limit, you can find the new one here. There are many, many worthwile essays to read through but I especially want to point out facetofcathy's How Could They? How Could Anyone?, ephemere's Itys and maychorian's On Fandom Reactions.

TRIGGER WARNING ON BOTH OF THESE (abusive relationships):

* Fugitivus - On Interpersonal Badness: If somebody is putting in the work to knock you down, it’s because they’ve got something to fear about you if you’re standing up.

* From issendai - How to Keep Someone With You Forever

AND ALSO THIS (body image, fat shaming):

* Golda Poretsky over at Body Love Wellness has an interview with Kai Hibbard, a finalist on The Biggest Loser: From seeing her fellow contestants forced to workout with injuries against doctor’s orders, to the extreme dehydration prior to weigh-ins, to the resultant eating disorder that Kai still is working to heal, the story she told was nothing like the fantasy that the Biggest Loser seeks to promote. | Part one | Part two | Part three |

Also, Perez Hilton is a plagiarist.

* Via redroanchronicles - Your Office Chair Is Killing You. Eep. [mentally rearranges home office]

* cleolinda talks about the tent city that sprung up for the 'Eclipse' premiere. 'Ware the comments on the linked ONTD post.

I found out the other day that bookshop has only just started reading Kate Beaton's history comics. Shock! Horror! And then I had a conversation with cimorene where I tried to push Gunnerkrigg Court and Templar, Arizona on her and I started thinking, what else don't people know about? Clearly it is time for a rec post.

Therefore, I am happy to present for your consideration:

( Webcomics I read on a regular basis/subscribe to/devour/etc )

( Webcomics I check every once in a while/wait to read in chunks )

( Webcomics I keep meaning to read )

( Artist pages/Links/other cool things )

Edit: So, what are you folks reading?

And now Gail Simone is back with a relaunch of Birds of Prey! Holy fuck, maybe DC loves me after all.

I mean, just. GAIL SIMONE. BIRDS OF PREY.