I Am Completely Serious

it is time....... to be a HUGE TROLL

Wed, 19 Aug 2015 04:21:59 GMT

(okay? okay.)

A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA IS WAY BETTER THAN EITHER THE DISPOSSESSED OR THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

LEGUIN'S SHORT FICTION IS BETTER THAN HER NOVELS BECAUSE NOVELS ALLOW HER TO SPEND TOO MUCH TIME ON CHARACTERIZATION, WHICH IS MOSTLY JUST "SYMPTOMS OF DEPRESSION," AND THAT'S RARELY NARRATIVELY COMPELLING, OKAY

ANNNNNND HER NON-SFF SHORT FICTION IS HONESTLY ON AVERAGE BETTER THAN THE SFF STUFF, THOUGH HER LIKE, TOP FIVE, THOSE ARE PROBABLY SFF

(ASIDE FROM OMELAS (YOU CAN'T WALK AWAY FROM THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS, INCOMPREHENSIBLE THEMATIC SEA KNOWN AS THE "SFF GENRE," IT'S INESCAPABLE AND IT HATES YOU AND IT'S GONNA OUTLAST YOU) THREE OR FOUR OF THE TOP FIVE ARE PROBABLY IN A FISHERMAN OF THE INLAND SEA, BUT I'M UNCOMFORTABLE CHOOSING)

(okay that's it for leguin, and, uh)

THE GOBLIN EMPEROR WASN'T VERY GOOD, LIKE, EVEN IF YOU LIKE THAT KIND OF H/C IDFIC STUFF THERE'S MORE-EMOTIONALLY-AFFECTING EXAMPLES OF IT IN LIKE THE FIRST COUPLE PAGES OF THE AO3'S HOMESTUCK TAG WHEN YOU SORT IT BY EITHER KUDOS OR BOOKMARKS

AND STEVEN UNIVERSE IS ALL-AROUND BETTER THAN THE ANCILLARY NOUN BOOKS AT >60% OF THE THINGS WHICH THE ANCILLARY NOUN BOOKS ARE TRYING TO ACHIEVE

THESE BOOKS ARE NOT GOOD AT DIALOG, AND ONLY INTERMITTENTLY GOOD AT CHARACTERIZATION, WHICH RENDERS THEIR PRETTY-COMPELLING AND -BELIEVABLE WORLDBUILDING CLINICAL AND PREACHY, AND ROBS THEIR POTENTIALLY-EXTREMELY-COMPELLING INDIVIDUAL EMOTIONAL ARCS OF ALL THE ACTUAL EMOTION

BREQ'S A SHITTY CHOICE FOR SOLE POV CHARACTER, SERIOUSLY, SHE SHOULD BE A FIGURE MOSTLY VIEWED AT A LUSTFUL/SEETHING/OVERAWED DISTANCE BY OTHER PEOPLE TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT HER DEAL IS LIKE SHE'S SOME KIND OF A FRANCIS LYMOND, HOW WAS THIS NOT OBVIOUS

THE FACT THAT ANCILLARY SWORD DIDN'T AT LEAST SWITCH OVER TO TISARWAT'S POV WHILE BREQ WAS OFF AT SUMMER CAMP IS A TOTAL WASTE OF A GOOD TISARWAT, I MEAN COME ON

(homestuck)

MOOMINVALLEY IN NOVEMBER IS ABOUT TWO HUNDRED PAGES LONG AND EASILY ACHIEVES 95% OF ANDREW HUSSIE'S APPARENT GOALS FOR ACT 6 OF HOMESTUCK, WHICH IS GONNA BE LONGER THAN PI BEFORE IT'S FUCKING OVER, WE WILL NEVER ESCAPE THIS INCREASINGLY-SELF-LOATHING RECURSIVE HELL-NARRATIVE

YET HOMESTUCK STILL DESERVES THE HUGO AND NEBULA AWARDS MORE THAN PROBABLY ANYTHING THAT'S WON EITHER SINCE 4/13/2009, BUT THE PEOPLE WHO VOTE IN THOSE AWARDS ARE JUST AS SMUGLY INSULAR ABOUT WHAT COUNTS AS "GOOD SFF" AS THE "LITERARY FICTION" PEOPLE WHOM THEY SO BITTERLY RESENT

SO THEY REFUSE TO READ IT BECAUSE IT'S GOT DICK JOKES AND EMBEDDED FLASH GAMES AND AN ENTHUSIASTIC FOLLOWING AMONG PRECISELY THE PEOPLE WHOM "SERIOUS SFF FANS" OF EVERY MAJOR POLITICAL STRIPE LEAST RESPECTS

FUCK US

I REGRET US

(AND HUSSIE'S JUST GOING TO KEEP POSTING OPAQUE HORSE JOKES ON TWITTER AND HATING THE WORLD FOREVER, WHICH IS NOT AN UNREASONABLE REACTION!, BUT IT'S GENERALLY DESTRUCTIVE AND SELF-DESTRUCTIVE AND Y'KNOW, UNGRACEFUL. AND I WOULD LIKE TO OFFER HIM SOME OF THE DRUGS I'M A LITTLE HIGH ON RIGHT NOW, I GUESS?

JUST, LIKE, TAKE A BREAK AND MAYBE WRITE LITERAL GODDAMN CON AIR FANFIC UNDER A PSEUDONYM OR SOME SHIT UNTIL YOUR HEAD'S IN A BETTER PLACE? TAKE SOME BRAIN-LASIX AND FLUSH THE RESULTING FLUIDS DOWN A SEPARATE NARRATIVE. THEN MAYBE SEGUE THAT ONE BACK INTO HOMESTUCK IF YOU WANT. BLOW SOME GODDAMN MINDS.)

(/homestuck)

THE HUGO AND NEBULA AWARDS ARE PRESENTLY WALLOWING IN A STATE OF SUCH DEEP INANITY AS TO BE USEFUL ONLY FOR MAKING PRIOR WINNERS FEEL BAD ABOUT THEMSELVES - WHICH OF COURSE IS THE WAY OF MOST ARTISTIC AWARDS MOST OF THE TIME! - BUT JESUS PEOPLE WE HAVE THE FUCKING INTERNET NOW, AND YOU'RE ALL NERDS WHO ARE ON THE INTERNET ALL THE TIME, IT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS TO YOU THAT YOU'RE NOT VOTING FOR "THE BEST SFF BOOKS" YOU'RE VOTING FOR "THE BOOKS MOST APPEALING TO READERS OF A COUPLE OF OVERCOOKED AND SOON-TO-BE-RIGHTFULLY-ABANDONED SUBGENRES OF SFF"

SO THE PUPPIES THING IS NOT AT ALL SURPRISING, IT'S BARELY EVEN A THING

THIS "COMMUNITY" IS SO INSULAR AND LAZY THAT MEDIOCRE TROLLS LIKE VOX DAY AND MEDIOCRE DICKHEADS LIKE AJA ROMANO ARE REGULARLY ABLE TO HOLD PEOPLE'S ATTENTION, WHILE THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL SHITARRAY THAT IS WINTERFOX WAS ABLE TO OPERATE COMFORTABLY FOR AN EXTENDED PERIOD OF TIME JUST BECAUSE EVERYTHING ELSE GOING ON IN HER GENERAL VICINITY WAS SO GODDAMN BORING

LIKE "LET'S ARGUE ABOUT WHETHER SLASH IS APPROPRIATIVE FOR THE THOUSANDTH FUCKING TIME, AND WHY THE GENRE'S FULL OF MONARCHIES EVEN IN SPACE, AND COMPLAIN ABOUT YA DYSTOPIAS AND ALSO DEFEND YA DYSTOPIAS, AND MOURN FOR OUR YOUTH FOR OUR SEPARATE INDIVIDUAL IDEOLOGICAL REASONS

BUT LET'S NOT READ ANYTHING BUT THESE FIVE OR SIX GODDAMN THINGS AND REMIXES OF AND REFLEXIVE REACTIONS TO THESE SPECIFIC THINGS"

LIKE YOU KNOW WHEN CERTAIN TEENAGE BOYS DON'T HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO, AND THEY START DARING EACH OTHER TO PUNCH THEMSELVES IN THE FUCKING FACE, AND INEVITABLY SOMEONE'S GOT TO GO TO THE ACTUAL ER

FUCK US, YOU KNOW?

(deep breath)

AND BUJOLD SUCKS NOW

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Wed, 27 May 2015 23:52:20 GMT

I saw this thread-title and was briefly excited because I had the following beliefs about what was going on:

1) There exists a superhero comic wherein the title character’s secret identity is not known to the fandom,

2) There exists within a recent issue of the comic sufficient evidence that the secret identity is real human person Tilda Swinton to prompt a thread about it,

3) Dr. Strange sounds to me like “guy who has a handlebar moustache and a cape” and thus there could theoretically be a comic with at least one scene in which Tilda Swinton hurriedly puts on her false moustache and cape before going into battle.

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Superhero Comic

Tue, 26 May 2015 09:45:14 GMT

someone: I'm gonna stop existing, see how that works out for me.

same person a little later w different hair: I did not like it.

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I read all of Girl Genius.

Sun, 15 Feb 2015 03:50:39 GMT

What fic should I read? Is there stuff about what Dupree and Gil were doing during the timeskip?

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How I Think Superhero Comics Work

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:17:05 GMT

The dude's name is Blood Guy, and he's all muscly and grimaces a lot and is mean, but you can tell he's the hero because he's in spandex? He's fighting the bad guy whose name is Sciencetar, and you know the bad guy's the bad guy because science is really bad. And they're going like,

"Blood Guy I am going to do a bad thing that's basically equivalent to setting off a nuclear bomb. We're calling it something different because people are used to nukes right, they're not scary anymore."

"I won't let you set off that bomb! I will never let you set off another bomb - the way you set off my wife. By which I mean you killed her. I was trying to do that "mirroring" thing, with re-using your words for dramatic effect, but I fucked it up."

"You cannot stop me! Misused Nietsche quote."

"Is that why you do your evil deeds!?"

"Yes it is because of my inadequate understanding of Nietsche."

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Broke down and watched Madoka Magica.

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 02:49:27 GMT

1) I'm able to admire it in aesthetic terms, but yeah, I still find its basic premise exasperating.

2) Wow, there are kind of a lot of similarities between this and Homestuck. If you want to make a new universe, you need somebody with time powers and somebody with space powers, working together self-consciously within the confines of a set of widely-understood genre tropes, while being jerked around by aliens.

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Some Homestuck thoughts.

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:01:07 GMT

* Hahaha, Caliborn and Jake really were made for each other. This is the realization of the interspecies hatelationship which Karkat dreamed of having with John.

* Either Kanaya or Jade is going to help Caliborn win the game. Space is the only element doubled up in the post-scratch session, meaning that one or the other of them is superfluous there. Meanwhile, Caliborn's session is missing its space player.

Thematically, it should probably be Jade - everything's always Jade's fault! - but practically, it seems likely that it'll be Kanaya. The meteor's there, and there hasn't yet been any explanation as to why Doc Scratch took an interest in her. This could explain it.

* At some point, either Caliborn, Gamzee, or some other intruder into Caliborn's session is going to have to ectobio Caliborn, Calliope, and whoever/whatever their ancestors were into existence. Unless Caliborn and Calliope are, themselves, the result of a post-scratch session, in which case ~~alt-Calliope did it herself~~ or no, a dancestor probably did it, gosh why is Homestuck so complicated.

I'm assuming that at some point we get to see who their ancestors were. If there are always the same number of ancestors/backup players as there are actual players, there was only one cherub pair preceding them. This indicates that Caliborn's Freudian slip regarding "mating with" Calliope was, you know, definitely an actual Freudian slip, and their hate/hate relationship was just a normal part of the cherub reproductive cycle. It seems like neither of them consciously knew that, though Calliope should have had access to the information necessary to work it out.

* This doesn't quite mesh with any of that, but it doesn't seem impossible that alt-Calliope and alt-Caliborn are somehow alpha-Calliope and alpha-Caliborn's ancestors. We know both from Fedorafreak's texts to Nannasprite and Karkat's explanation of the Exiles that one meteor-bombarded planet can spawn multiple Incipispheres.

* It would 1) make sense, and 2) be funny if Rose either mis-aimed or was fucking with everyone, and the meteor's actually going to bust into Caliborn's session. Or into the hypothetical pre-scratch version of Caliborn's session. It would explain the presence of both the meteor and those JPEG artifacts. What else would Dave do upon being presented with a post-apocalyptic Earth?

If Rose mis-aimed, it's probably somehow because of Roxy's blackout of the session, given her ability to "flummox those with plans beyond mortal understanding." That pretty much describes Rose, right? If this happens, Dave might then be able to get them into the session anyway, by taking them back to Earth as it was much earlier in the timeline.

The other obvious alternative is that the meteor enters the post-scratch session as planned and then gets sent back to Earth through a Skaia-portal. Presumably it has Dave, at least, still on it, so he can tip off the post-scratch beta group as to the various things they need to be doing. He could then get back into the session by hiding in Dirk's apartment or Jane or Roxy's house just before they enter.

* It would be pretty awesome if Meenah and the Condesce met up and joined forces, given that they seem to have the same goal. On the other hand, they probably wouldn't actually get along, given that the only characters able to be civil to their alternate versions of themselves are Dave and Aradia, who are, not coincidentally, the Time players. The other characters who have met themselves have hated themselves, and Doc Scratch says that that's normal.

* All other foreshadowing aside, given Jade's fellow-Space-player example, there's no way Calliope and alt-Calliope will get along.

* What is going on with the post-scratch kids' denizens, anyway?

* The only element missing from the post-scratch session is Doom, and Sollux isn't quite dead. I wonder if he's somehow necessary?

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Christmukkougatsu.

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 04:44:29 GMT

I got two books, a sweater, a flashlight, incense, chocolate, a replacement breadmaker, and Homestuck updated.

One of the books was the second Finder omnibus. Why is Finder so ridiculously good? And creepy? "Dream Sequence" is unbelievably creepy. There are horror writers who spend their whole careers failing to come up with ideas as awful as the scarecrow people. And then McNeil switches tracks to the relentlessly adorable "Mystery Date," because she has an approximately one-volume-long attention span.

The Homestuck update was perfect and upsetting. Both things simultaneously. My heart hurts.

I hope that we get to see the moment at which Dave finds out about this. Actually, I hope Dave meets the sprite before he actually meets Dirk. I just want Dave traumatized forever, I guess. Hasn't been enough of that yet.

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So that happened.

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 22:40:31 GMT

New Elfquest chapters will be going up on BoingBoing now. Two things about which I feel troubled and ambivalent have come together as one.

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The World of Warcraft comic books are pretty amazingly awful.

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 01:57:59 GMT

This is like my third attempt to get through the one where Varian Wrynn gets amnesiac and split in two like in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. I just can't do it. Syaoran needs to sit him down and give him a stern talk about how to handle this sort of sitution. "Listen, Varian - no, listen, stop scrunching your face up in an agonized way like that. If neither of your halves are interesting in themselves, then the fact that they're the same person will not be interesting, either. And this sort of Jungian double thing really works better if both halves have consistent personalities and motivations from one page to the next."

I've decided that Varian envied Thrall's backstory and wanted it for himself, and thus the whole thing where he got himself enslaved and became a gladiator was planned and intentional. He just wanted to be more like Thrall! This is my new mental canon.

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Finder Library v 1, by Carla Speed McNeil

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 01:45:12 GMT

Finder Library v 1, by Carla Speed McNeil

I wanted something like City of Diamond, and this is it!

This is a science fiction comic set in a sort of post-post-apocalyptic future - the world has suffered some sort of sharp technological descent and the survivors have reformed a basically stable but systemically unfair society. They are kinda lackadaisically trying to rebuild, in between genetically engineering themselves and building evil theme parks. Most of the action takes place in an ancient domed city called Anvard, inhabited by fairly technologically advanced people who nonetheless can't figure out exactly what the dome's made of or why there's no night inside of it. The ruling classes consist of the members of heavily genetically-engineered collectives called Houses, whose members are chosen according to a very specific physical and emotional aesthetic.

The nominal protagonist is Jaeger, a nomad from outside the city who has a secret calling as a "Finder" - someone who finds important things for people without any reward. He's in a relationship with a formerly upper-class woman named Emma, formerly of house Llaverac and recently escaped from an abusive marriage with a man of another caste. Emma spends half her time in a complex dreamworld engineered to protect her from the trauma of her marriage. She has three daughters, the eldest of whom, Rachel, has a crush on Jaeger and the youngest of whom, Marcie, wants him to be her father. The middle daughter, Lynne, is in fact a boy raised as a girl, and has reason to think of Jaeger as a traitor to their family.

Those two paragraphs sound like they ought to sum up the plot, but they don't, because there are a couple million other things going on. The worldbuilding is extremely, ridiculously complex, and I had to flip back and forth a lot to figure out what was going on. Lynne's biological gender doesn't come up in the text until eight issues in, and it's not because it was supposed to be a secret, it's just that McNeil didn't find space to mention it until then. She needed to fit in all these functional oracles kept in museums, tribes of sentient bipedal lion-women with semi-sentient quadrupedal mates, and homages to Osamu Tezuka's Ode to Kirihito. The woman's busy, okay? The lengthy footnotes for each chapter are just as likely to go off on a tangent about psychoanalysis as they are to actually explain what's going on. You just have to pay attention and pick it up. There will be a quiz.

The problem with making comics with this level of visual complexity is that it takes a lot of time and energy, if you don't have a pile of assistants like a Shounen Jump artist. The speed at which McNeil is developing this world in her head seems to be outpacing the speed at which she's able to get it down on paper. (Kubo Tite needs to send her some of his dudes, it's not like he's doing anything important with them.) I obviously do not complain about the result, but it's not something you want to read for the first time when you're tired.

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Two dissimilar webcomics which Shaenon Garrity has lately induced me to read.

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 01:46:27 GMT

Kiwi Blitz

This is so cute. It's about a girl named Steffi who does Pokemon-seriousness-level arena fights in big cute mecha. Her dad, a roboticist, gives her a special one of her own, which looks like a giant kiwi bird. She naturally decides that she needs to fight crime in it. Her dad also thinks that this would be great. Her best friend/sidekick Benzene is less sure about the wisdom of the idea, but agrees to help her in a vain attempt to keep her out of trouble.

Oglaf

This, on the other hand, is extremely filthy. It's by the Platinum Grit people, and it is filthier than Platinum Grit, so. Extremely filthy. The archive page labels the comics that are not pornographic: "SFW", "Not dirty at all," "Low level swearing, questionable attitude." It's funny.

The present plotline, if you can call it that, involves a very angry bounty hunter woman and a hyperactive "doctor" who actually just gives blow jobs. Both of them are trying to destroy the Fun God, whose followers have been kidnapping the monks whom the doctor has been fellating. But I had to read it twice to figure out that that was what was going on. Plot progression is not exactly the main focus here. There's a sequence where, upon consultation with the monks, the doctor dresses up as a "fruit viking" to seduce information out of a bad guy, because none of them are entirely clear on the concept of seduction.

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Plagiarism!

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 03:57:37 GMT

This Cul de Sac comic prefigured I Want My Hat Back by three years!

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I need to stop reading all this ElfQuest.

Wed, 25 May 2011 04:12:03 GMT

I have gotten through the first three arcs in three days. This cannot possibly be good for me. I dreamed about soulbonded wolf-riding elves last night.

(I think they were in Las Vegas, though? So, that's something.)

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The primary effects of steroids.

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 10:56:26 GMT

Thin mints and a Second Life bender, apparently. (I can't sleep.) I actually set up a frigging Tumblr during the early stages of the bender, and now I'm sitting here fiddling with libopenmv trying to make a little bot, because that is what I do when I cannot sleep. I attempt to create software for which I have no conceivable use.

I'm also taking my fiction far too personally; I was in the middle of a Basara binge before the surgery, but I can't go back to it now because it will destroy me. Tamura does not know how to pull punches.

And while Tom Siddell does - and in fact does so far too frequently, to be honest - Gunnerkrigg Court's current plotline is unnerving me badly. Don't fight, Annie and Kat! Be friends again! My heart can't take it!

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ZOMG

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 23:51:48 GMT

It appears as if the Foglios have written a Girl Genius novel! And on the same day, NK Jemisin announces more books!

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Thoughts.

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 04:33:12 GMT

I re-read a couple volumes of Ranma. "St. Bacchus High School" and "Kolkhoz High School," huh.

I first read Ranma when I was about twelve, and I assume that it did not occur to me at the time that "Kolkhoz" might not be a Japanese word. But I knew Greek mythology, and yet I do not recall thinking anything in particular about the name of Kodachi's school.

I also read Jeff Smith's Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil. Jeff Smith, these giant robots look suspiciously like the rat creatures from Bone. Also, in this comic, everything that happens happens for essentially no reason. Not that I mind! It's way too cute for me to mind!

Apparently Saburo Ienaga went to school in Aichi and taught in Niigata! I totally followed in his footsteps! Except for, you know, the part with all the fighting for justice. I need to get out and do that more.

Sometimes I just feel the urge to shout, "Fools! I'll destroy you all!"

Relatedly, I'm considering engineering school.

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Today is the day that I post ostensibly private correspondence.

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 03:14:07 GMT

From an email I sent to Mom today:

Yesterday I was in a used bookstore and saw the first five volumes of the comic book Bone for sale half-off. You may remember it as the extremely thick comic book - 1300 pages - that I'd borrowed from the library which thegeekgene* managed to read all of on the drive to see, I think, U of Chicago and Beloit. She finished it up as you guys were dropping me off back at the dorm.

I had been thinking about re-reading it, and I'd rather have the multi-volume color version than the one-volume black-and-white, so I got them. Today thegeekgene texted me wanting to know if I'd ever actually bought a copy. Clearly her long-latent psychic powers are finally emerging. Or else mine are. Possibly both. Tests will be necessary.

-

* I do not actually refer to thegeekgene by her LiveJournal name in correspondence with her mother. Though Mom reads my blog and knows our screen names, so far as I know she does not herself have a LJ, or even a DW (though I hold that getting them would probably aid her in her eternal quest for like, Lensman slash, or Foundation slash or whatever kind of prehistoric slash it is that she's reading over there). The convention would not, therefore, be appropriate. I feel certain that Miss Manners would agree.

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Comics/Manga I Have Read Recently That You Should Totally Read Too Report

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:06:11 GMT

Dicebox, by Jenn Manley Lee

Griffen and Molly are a hard-bitten semi-lesbian sorta-couple who move from place to place in a dysfunctional far-future world, going whereever work is, and sometimes finding explosions in the same places. Griffen, alternately charming and acid-tongued, is a former highly-ranked civil servant. Something happened that left her deeply damaged and bitter, and she compulsively picks fights and keeps secrets. Molly, younger by at least a decade, has brain damage that makes her forget things, and causes her to see vivid hallucinations that may not entirely be hallucinations. She's both protective of Griffen and bewildered by her, though empirical evidence would suggest that she does a better job of understanding Griffen than Griffen does her.

Though they have a deeply caring spousal relationship, it's also a polyamorous one, and we only see them sleeping with other people. The aggressively androgynous Griffen seems to prefer men she can out-talk (though this is true of most men), while Molly's preference seems to be for smart, big-boned women, similar to herself. There are a lot of scenes demonstrating both these preferences! So, not PG-rated. Just so you know.

Most of the art is in the service of the dialog, but occasionally Lee will shock you with a big spread of one of Molly's evocative hallucination's, or of the clearly-carefully-thought-out world the characters live in.

The story so far has apparently only been a prologue to set up the characters; hence we only have hints of what Griffen and Molly's pasts have been like. My guess would be that the real plot, when it starts up, will be the results of something ill-advised Griffen does. This appeals to me!

A hard sci-fi webcomic featuring gorgeous full-color art, thoughtful world-building, a multiethnic cast, lesbians, dark secrets, ungendered pronouns, and snark. What more could one possibly ask?

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Afterschool Charisma, by Kumiko Suekane

Shiro Kamiya is the only ordinary human kid at an exclusive private boarding school where every other student is a clone of a famous genius of some kind. Along with his best friends, Napoleon and Hitler, and his crush Marie Curie -

You may still be stuck mid-way through that sentence. I'll give you a minute.

Man, Freud, why you always gotta be like that...

This manga walks the shoujo-private-school-manga walk perfectly - sometimes you can't tell if it's aware of the absurdity of its premise. As any historian will tell you, the majority of important historical figures were actually shoujo manga characters, so there are plenty of scenes like this:

And this:

And this!

(That's Mozart.)

But at other times there's a self-awareness to it that makes me think it's going somewhere much crueler.

The cloning project, about which few of our spoiled heroes have thought too carefully, has been going on for some time. In the first chapter the adult clone of John F. Kennedy announces his bid for President of the United States - and is promptly assassinated. At the same time, Marie Curie, who has defied the school by saying she wants to study music, not science, is abruptly "transferred to a music school." You will note that I put that in scare quotes. Is Clone Academy harboring some dark secret?

The answer is yes. Yes, Clone Academy is harboring some dark secret. Possibly even two.

Shiro, the project's head scientist's son, has clearly been enrolled in the school as a mole for his father - though, being a Shoujo Heroine Plucky-Type v. 1.8, his trust in authority is complete, and he has no idea. (Literally every page I expect him to be revealed as a clone of the eugenicist Shiro Ishii, created to take over the project.) Though all seems cheerful on the outside, the stress of the school's expecations of the clones is - in ways both subtle and unsubtle - driving many of them insane.

(Hitler!)

Most of the clones seem to blame themselves for their failings, and a group of them have even started a secretive cult devoted to the worship and emulation of their perfect originals. Shiro's frenemy Freud is the only one of the heroes who seems to have the sense to suspect the motives the creators of the experiment. I suspect doom for Freud. Doom!

No, Freud! Don't sit down in a dimly-lit room and look furtively around you before entering a password! That is something that doomed people do!

I am really enjoying this, but have no doubt that all the heroes are going to be utterly savaged. Be warned!

(Oh, and another warning: the female characters, so far, are reeeally iffy. Somehow, I just don't think Queen Elizabeth and Florence Nightingale ought to be totally dependent on male approval! Doesn't seem right.)

The first volume of this is up on Viz's website for free. Go forth!

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Otoyomegatari / A Young Wive's Tale, by Kaoru Mori

This is another gorgeous, charming, carefully-researched, occasionally-slightly-less-than-feminist historical comic by Kaoru Mori, artist of Emma.

If you like any aspect of this page, you will like the manga. If you don't, you'll probably also like it! Unless you have no soul. I cannot advise people who have no soul, and so generally exert myself not to attempt it. Maybe you guys should go read, like, friggin' Saber Marionette or something? Christ, I don't know.

I'm really only posting to say, Hey! Translation of the newest chapter just came out! Because I don't feel like reasonable people need to be convinced of this one.

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I am excited about a Gunnerkrigg Court chapter with Parley and Smith.

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:47:43 GMT

Just look at the faces they’re making!

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

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Kind of related?

Thu, 28 May 2009 15:10:02 GMT

When I was a kid, I remember reading this very didactic Jetsons comic book* where computer animation was evil because it was incapable of producing true art, and also put true artists out of work. Luckily, the computers the big evil animation company is using break down, so they realize the error of their ways, and Elroy saves the day by making a bunch of robots to hand-draw the animation.

The divide there seemed kind of arbitrary to me even as a ten-year-old.**

I wonder if I can find scans?

* I think it was a comic book, and not an episode of the cartoon; I have this image of a big speech bubble over Elroy’s head.

** I have no idea when I would have read this, but I’m assuming this whole thing was about Toy Story. Though I guess they could’ve been reacting to ReBoot, or maybe Donkey Kong Country? But those were still just a year earlier.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

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