Gone Girl, no, wait, Young Avengers

I would have something interesting to say on this Monday morning, but I read Gone Girl this weekend and I don’t want to spoil it for anyone.

Oh, wait!

I made a fanmix for the forthcoming Young Avengers comic, by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie.

The comic is not even out yet, and I want to make fanworks for it.

Here’s the fanmix post on Tumblr.

And Kieron Gillen’s Meet the Team intro post.

And here is Gillen’s post on Kate Bishop.

And here’s a lettered preview of Young Avengers.

And Gillen’s Meet Marvel Boy.

2012 Moments in Fandom

2012 Moments in Fandom

Your main fandom of the year?

My fannish participation this year has been consuming the works of others. And by that measure my principle fandoms were Marvel’s Avengers movie, Pitch Perfect, and Once Upon a Time. But that’s misleading. What I actually have been a fan of this year are

1) the updates to AO3 that makes finding the fanfic I want easier for me, and
2) Tumblr.

Tumblr is a TERRIBLE medium for having a conversation. About anything. It’s a TERRIBLE venue for deep conversation. What it is really awesome at is flickering shiny curated visual fanworks — fanart, gifs, cosplay, animated gifs, vids, and show clips — in front of my easily entertained eyeballs.

I appreciate this greatly. I do not want to take the time to learn to make these things. But I love them — I love the cosplay, love the fanvids, love the gifs, love the transformative nature of creative fanworks. Yet, I don’t want to struggle to find things I like. Tumblr makes it easy for me to passively consume the fanworks I enjoy, and it makes it easy for me to pass those on to other people.

“Look at this shiny thing! It’s funny/poignant/sarcastic/queer/assertive/whimsical/whatever! I really like it!”

I appreciate this quality about Tumblr.

Your favorite film you watched this year?

The film I liked the most, from start to finish, as written and performed, was The Avengers. I loved many, many things about that movie. The performances. The characters. The costumes. The sets. The dialog. The messages. The plot. The action. I loved it all. I’ve been reading rather a great deal of Avengers fic on AO3. I like this universe and I like what people are doing with it.

I also like the authorized movie fanfic — namely, Avengers Assembled. This comic is set inside the Marvel comic-verse, but it’s specifically for new readers who loved the movie and want to get inside this world. I recommend it highly.

My other favorite film is a movie I love more in my head than in reality. I watched Pitch Perfect and loved it with a crazy love. But I edit out about … 25% of the film. All the gross-out humor. The humiliation stuff. And about half of the heterosexuality. So. I’ve read ALL the Pitch Perfect fanfic on AO3. But I can’t say the movie was actually my favorite this year. That would be Avengers

Your favorite book read this year?

I read all eighteen of the Kerry Greenwood Phyrne Fisher novels this year. Twice. I’m holding off on starting a third re-read because I have a lot of books on my tablet that I have purchased and not yet read. Plus, as I write this, a three-week backlog on comics. I wrote about the books here. I don’t have much to add to that; I love them to pieces.

Your favorite tv show of the year?

This was tough this year. Game of Thrones? Downton Abbey? Doctor Who? I love those shows, and more besides. But the show that I clearly have the greatest fannish obsession with is Once Upon a Time.

OUaT went from being a show that lost me in the last four episodes of the first season to being a show that I pine for each week. I went back and watch the end of season one, and I am still not impressed with it. But season two keeps me coming back.

Here’s the thing. This is NOT an unproblematic show. The treatment of characters of color is shabby-to-poor. The handling of adoption as a major show theme is wildly variable. I have an auto-dislike of stories that are solved by The Power of True Love — I prefer plots to be resolved by grit, repentance, and true change. Almost all of the male characters are either not written well, not acted well, or both.

But.

This is an ensemble show in which the women — all of the women — are well-written, well-realized, and mostly well-acted.

I harp on how the thing I want in minority representation is VARIETY. I do not want ONE lesbian to represent all lesbians, I want a variety of portrayals. I do not want ONE geeky girl, I want a host of geeky girls and women of all sorts. I do not want ONE character of color whose primary characteristic is that they are not-white, I want diversity. Variety. I want the pantheon of human existence and experience to be represented broadly across the vast bulk of fiction.

OUaT does many things half-assedly. But it represents white women pretty well. And as one portion of the entertainment I consume, I love it.

Your best new fandom discovery of the year?

Scandal.

All my thanks to Anika for pointing this one out to me. Scandal is fantastic.

I realized, halfway through the season two opener, that Scandal is a Vorkosigan story. We have this manically driven leader of a team of misfit crusaders, who work around the edges of a political-military system which is problematic but also the only game in town, fighting to maintain their secrecy, integrity, and position, while also fighting to protect each other.

I could talk more about the specifics but I truly do not want to spoil the show in case any of you intend to watch it.

Snappy dialog? Check.
Attractive actors? Check.
Characters of color in a variety of types of roles? Check.
Men and women in a variety of types of roles? Check.
Poor decision-making based on an over-developed sense of justice? Check.
Poor decision-making based on guilt? Check.
Attempts at redemption? Check.

I do love this show. So very much.

Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?

DC Comics has consistently shown that, not only do they not want to support comics I want to read, they aren’t even concerned that I don’t want to read their stuff. This stings, it truly does. But I am comforted by the fact that the wheel turns, and eventually these people will not be in control of characters I like.

Your fiction boyfriend of the year?

Jaqen H’ghar, from season two of Game of Thrones.
Thor.

Your fiction girlfriend of the year?

Regina Mills from Once Upon a Time.
Natasha Romonov from the Avengers movie.
Dex Parios from the Greg Rucka and Matt Southworth comic, Stumptown. Which is a terrible idea. I should never date any Greg Rucka characters.
Beca from Pitch Perfect.
Quinn Perkins from Scandal
Kate Bishop from Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye comic.

And in the want-to-be-them, not want-to-date-them camp:

Carol Danvers from Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Captain Marvel comic.
Phyrne Fisher.
Ruby from Once Upon a Time.

Your biggest squee moment of the year?

Probably when I saw that Rucka had included Mim in Stumptown. I mean, I squealed audibly, and then all over the internet.

My other squee moments, well, I was trying very hard to be calm and professional, and so the squee manifested as a complete lack of affect. These mostly involve meeting people whose work I have a huge amount of respect for, and getting to tell them how much their work means to me. But this also includes the publication of Chicks Dig Comics, the book I co-edited with Lynne Thomas.

There’s a book out there that I helped put into the world. This made me really damn happy.

The most missed of your old fandoms?

I’m not sure I really missed any this year.

Your biggest fan anticipations for the coming year?

I don’t really know! I try to avoid the marketing associated with fiction properties I love, because the marketing for them makes me angry and avoidant. So I don’t know what’s coming, fannishly. There’s … another Marvel movie? I suppose? And Seanan has a book coming out? Maybe two? And the nineteenth Phryne Fisher book is coming out in January. And … there will be more comics? And tv shows?

Professionally, I have a couple of projects coming out in 2013 that I am really looking forward to.

***

Past Moments in Fandom posts:

2008
2009
2010
2011

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December 14 2012

1. Tumblr has reminded me how very much I love Bill Sienkiewicz’s art. He was on New Mutants during a … formative period of my comics-reading life. Some part of my head thinks that THIS is what art LOOKS like.

His art made all the stories, even the reasonably light-hearted ones about slumber parties, full of tense foreboding. And when the characters actually died?

Whoa.

2. I made a BEST carrot-cauliflower-cumin soup this week. The very, very best. I can’t really give a recipe, because I looked at the recipe on allrecipes.com and I didn’t have some of the things, and I had some other things, and I winged it.

3. I love my phone. The Droid Razr Maxx HD. They are really not kidding about the battery life, dear sweet crickets, no they are not. This battery is freakin’ amazing.

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Things I Like: Daniel Govar’s “X-Men Days of Future Past”

Daniel Govar’s X-Men Days of Future Past

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The “Days of Future Past” storyline, AU, world, plot, or whatever it happens to be is a part of X-Men comics that I … don’t always like. I like the fact that it gave us Rachel, I like the very first, original, story. I like some of the repercussions since then. But there’s a lot of crazy wacky later additions I tend to ignore.

That’s okay. I’m an X-Men fan. We are used to this sort of mental shenanigans.

But Daniel Govar’s illustration, above, is like my dream of DFP. Kitty is adult, clearly in charge, leading the tattered remnants of the X-Men. Alex and Lorna are the heavy hitters, along with Lockheed. Pete and Logan are the brawlers. Ororo is part of the team. Illyana is … creepy, which I love.

But what I love, what I love most about this illustration, is who is looking at whom and what Sekrit Messages this sends the fanon in my head.

I particularly love that this is framed by Rachel the Hound’s gaze. We’re looking over her shoulder. We see what she sees. Kitty is staring at her, daring her to do something. I imagine the next moment after this picture and I like what I see. I like how the story after this moment plays out in my head.

Thank you, Mr. Govar. I really like your art.

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Pretty Deadly

Pretty Deadly SDCC teaser

At SDCC this weekend, Image Comics showed this teaser art for a forthcoming comic by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios.

2013, it says. Mark your calendars.

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What my Local Comics Store clerk thinks of digital comics

So I went to my LCS yesterday — The Source Comics and Games, Falcon Heights, MN, can’t recommend them highly enough! — and removed six titles from my pull list.

This is not a ton. As the gentlemen who assisted me pointed out, my pull list on their computer is two-and-a-half screens long. But I expect to remove two-to-six titles every week this month. I expect to cut my pull list in half.

I chatted with the gentleman in question about my concerns. He agreed that it’s a conundrum — The Source keeps their back issues in a WAREHOUSE that they rent. In long boxes, on shelves, alphabetically by title. They are two years behind on their bagging and boxing. Just like me.

He said that whenever they file something, they have to shuffle the existing titles along in the boxes. Get a whole bunch of Batman back issues and you’re shuffling issues through the whole alphabet. It’s a pain. There’s no easy solution.

I said that I was buying the X-Men and Avengers titles digitally. But then we talked — where’s the cut-off? I am of COURSE going to buy Captain Marvel in floppies. I know how crucial that is for a new mid-list title. I also know that buying Uncanny X-Men digitally is not going to get the title cancelled. (But is it going to lose Kieron Gillen his writing gig if scads of folks move to digital Uncanny on his watch? Does that sort of thing happen? I don’t know, and I like and respect Mr. Gillen and would hate to see his tenure on Uncanny end prematurely due to a drop in single-issue sales.)

But what about New Mutants? It’s an X-Family title, it’s on issue 42 this month. It’s been involved in lots of crossovers, it seems to have legs. But it’s not Uncanny X-Men. Does switching to digital hurt that title?

How does this work for Dark Horse, or other companies? I still have Alabaster and Dark Horse Presents in my physical, LCS, pulls. But I didn’t even buy Chew until I got my tablet and signed up for Comixology. I’m not going to start buying it in floppies now. How does my digital purchase of Chew, and Locke and Key, help or hurt those books?

We talked, the clerk and I, about this conundrum. He didn’t have any answers for me. There’s a clear low end of sales, that needs to be pre-ordered in physical single issues. And there’s a clear high end that can withstand digital sales. But we don’t know about the mid-list.

I’m not sure what titles come out next week. I expect I’ll log onto Comixology in the morning, buy a number of digital titles, and then go cancel those orders at my comics store.

As problems go, this is really a trivial one. I’m actually quite grateful that I don’t much have problems worse than this. But in the aggregate this is a problem the entire comics industry has. I’m certain that eventually digital comics will be a significant portion of sales. I’m just not sure how it’s going to come about.

Chicks Dig Comics Table of Contents

The time has come when I can reveal the full splendor of the contributors for the forthcoming Chicks Dig Comics.

Introduction by Mark Waid
Editors’ Foreword, by Lynne M. Thomas and Sigrid Ellis
Mary Batson and the Chimera Society, by Gail Simone
Summers and Winters, Frost and Fire, by Seanan McGuire
Cosplay, Creation, and Community, by Erica McGillivray
An Interview with Amanda Conner
A Matter of When, by Carla Speed McNeil
The Other Side of the Desk, by Rachel Edidin
An Interview with Terry Moore
Nineteen Panels about Me and Comics, by Sara Ryan
I’m Batman, by Tammy Garrison
An Interview with Alisa Bendis
My Secret Identity, by Caroline Pruett
The Green Lantern Mythos: A Metaphor for My (Comic Book) Life, by Jill Pantozzi
Vampirella, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Page Turn, by Jen Van Meter
Confessions of a (Former) Unicorn, by Tara O’Shea
The Evolution of a Tart, by Sheena McNeil
Kitty Queer, by Sigrid Ellis
The Captain in the Capitol: Invoking the Superhero in Daily Life by, Jennifer Margret Smith
Burn, Baby Burn, by Lloyd Rose
Tune in Tomorrow, by Sue DCWKA
An Interview with Greg Rucka
Comic Book Junkie, by Jill Thompson
From Pogo to Girl Genius, by Delia Sherman
I am Sisyphus, and I am Happy, by Kelly Thompson
Captain America’s Next Top Model, by Anika Dane Milik
An Interview with Louise Simonson
Me Vs. Me, by Sarah Kuhn
A Road That has No Ending: Revenge in Sandman, by Sarah Monette
Mutants, by Marjorie Liu
You’re on the Global Frequency, by Elizabeth Bear
Crush on a Superhero, by Colleen Doran

When I have dropped irritatingly coy hints about how proud I am of our contributors, how pleased I am with the book, well, now you understand why. The essays in Chicks Dig Comics are from some of the brightest, most passionate, most articulate lovers of comics books I have the pleasure to know. I am proud of their work, and of this book.

You can pre-order Chicks Dig Comics.

Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Powell’s
Indiebound
Diamond

Spread the word, if you can. Tell your local comic store about the book, about the fact that Diamond is shipping it. Tell your friends, your LiveJournal or Dreamwidth, tell your blog. Tell your Facebook and Google+ acquaintances. Look at that table of contents and pre-order a copy for your mom, your sister, the girl who sits next to you in Greek Lit and doodles Wonder Woman during lecture.

If this book is anything at all, it’s a love letter. Glance up at that Table of Contents again, will you? If you love comics, just look at the company you keep.

January 13 2012

1. Last night I got home from circus, put the kids to bed, made a snack, watched my gaming group play Dominion, and then … cooked lunches for the week.

I did not have a plan. I did not have a recipe. I chopped the garlic and the onions, put them in the pan, then opened the refrigerator and figured out what I needed to use before it went bad. Fifteen minutes later I was putting cumin-chili-lemon tofu with rainbow vegetables into the fridge.

I think I can no longer say I don’t cook.

2. I am still very very happy about this cover for X-Men Legacy #260.1, from this week.

Rachel. Raaaaaaaaaachel. That is totally my girl there. In the red. With the face tattoos and the leather and yep. My girl, there.

3. My convention schedule for the coming year is solidifying. I will be at:

C2E2, April 13-15, in Chicago, IL.

Wiscon 36, May 25-28th, in Madison, WI.

CONvergence 2012, July 5-8, in Bloomington, MN.

I hope to be at Worldcon, aka Chicon 7, August 31-September 4, and I have pre-registered for it. But I don’t have the time off from work yet. The others are assured!

November 29th 2011

1. My boots are dead.

I have four pair of boots. There’s the motorcycle boots with the chains, which I love the look of but cannot wear much. They are too big in the foot, and too tight in the calf, and they make my knees hurt. Yet I cannot part with them. Then there’s my everyday boots, the ones I replace every two years and wear constantly in the spring and the fall. I have two pair of winter boots — no, three, this is Minnesota, one is the emergency pair that stays in the Winter Kit in the trunk of my car. One pair is mid-calf height and very, very warm. Too warm for most winter days. The final pair, my everyday Columbia winter boots, are the ones that died.

The leather and the rubber had become separated, which is not an insurmountable problem. The rubber had crack and spilt, also not insurmountable. But the rubber had cracked and split and the leather had torn away on the spot where the toe bends with each step, and THAT proves to be irreparable. I left the shoe repair place with a heavy, heavy heart.

However.

2. I bought new everyday winter boots. Also Columbia brand, slightly higher, slightly lighter, rated to -25F. I think they will do very nicely.

3. I bought Christmas cards, go me.

4. My Jamie McKelvie poster arrived today, the one with two young adults on a rooftop. In my head this is an AU story about Scott Summers and Jean Grey, in which they are international models-slash-spies. Scott is the American, and Jean is Scottish. He is a solid company man and she is a quadruple agent, sometimes it’s hard to keep track. They are at an afternoon reception, and have slipped away to the roof to meet — they are pretending to have a torrid, semi-secret, on-again-off-again scandalous affair in order to explain their relationship and hide that they are spies. Jean has just given Scott the secret documents and is heading back downstairs to pretend they just had a fight. Little do they know that their subterfuge has been spotted by agents in the building behind them. Hijinks will ensue.

Okay, I didn’t say it was a GREAT story, just that it is in my head.

It is, however, a great print. Thank you, Mr. McKelvie.

5. I had a list of things I was to get done today, and I have lost the list. I’d best get on that.

The Fandoms-As-Exes Meme

Note: By fandom I mean the property itself, not the fannish communities surrounding that property.

The one who seduced you, screwed you over, broke your heart in a million pieces, and laughed about it.

Battlestar Galactica. My god, show, what the hell HAPPENED to you? What were you thinking? How could you go crazy in just that way that sucked so badly when you had SO MUCH PROMISE?

The old flame you don’t see very often any more but whom you still really enjoy getting together with for a few drinks and maybe a pleasant nostalgic romp:

Buffy. Aww, Buffy, I will always think kindly of you, despite being older and wiser now and recognizing that we’ve grown apart.

The mysterious dark one whom you used to sit up with talking until 3 AM at weird coffee houses and with whom you were quite smitten until you realized s/he really was fucking crazy:

Carnivale. That show is insane, and was from the start.

The one you spent a whole weekend in bed with and who drank up all your liquor and whom you’d still really like to get with again, although you’re relieved s/he doesn’t actually live in town:

My-HiME and My-Otome.

The steady:

Comics. Comics comics comics comics, they are my life-long fannish partner.

The alluring stranger whom you’ve flirted with at parties but have never gotten really serious with:

Hot FBI/CIA posse fandom — Criminal Minds, Fringe, all the tv shows with FBI and CIA teams doing Very Serious Work, who have very attractive and very serious women on them.

The one you hang out with and have vague fantasies about maybe having a thing with, but ultimately you’re just good buddies:

The Terminator franchise. I mean, I love the movies and T:SCC, but I just can’t get into the fandoms and the fic-writing and such. I still respect them, it’s not you it’s me.

The one your friends keep introducing you to and who seems like a hell of a cool person except it’s never really gone anywhere:

Full Metal Alchemist. I actually really do like the manga and the anime, but it’s not what I want it to be, ultimately. (I want it to be ALL Team Mustang all the time, and much much less alchemy and the Elric brothers.)

The one who’s slept with all your friends, and you keep looking at them and thinking, “How the hell did they land all these cool people?”

Canadian Six Degrees fandom. I keep WATCHING all these shows, wondering what the hell people see in them, and I got nothin’.

The one who gave you the best damned summer of your life and against whom you measure all other potential partners:

The X-Men-related comics from 1985-1989.

The one you recently met at a party and would like to get to know better:

Shadowunit.

The old flame that you wouldn’t totally object to hooking up with again for a one night romp if only they’d clean up a bit:

Dark Angel, with less of the guys and more of Max’s angst.

Your hot new flame:

Hmm, not sure I have one …

The one who stole your significant other:

I don’t know what this means …