#text.tb

[tbcanary]

it’s for the best that ollie generally doesn’t work as an average guy in an office bc we all know that one dude who really wants to have chili cook offs every couple months and no one else ever wants to do it and then when it finally happens he loses and gets a little dad guy sad about it. ollie would lose to someone who doesn’t even like chili and he’d be so upset he’d have to quit his job.

[leonstamatis]

the thing about kitchens is that i don’t actually need a big one. it’s just that most of the apartments I’ve lived in haven’t felt the need to give me much space in one. it’s always cramped and small and poorly ventilated. in our current place there isn’t even really enough room for two people to stand, which means cooking meals kind of becomes a one person job by default. when i say i want a big kitchen I don’t even mean like, huge hgtv approved monstrosity. i just mean like, a full size dishwasher, enough counter space for a cutting board AND a mixing bowl, and enough room to stand next to my partner as we cook together. apartment living would have you believe these are unreasonable; i suspect they are not.

[tbcanary]

ollie queen back in star city stopping robberies and investigating murder is something that can be so personal

[tbcanary]

this is in no way the biggest problem with the bc run (see previous reblogs for that) but the whole framing device is so. bad. I don’t want to hear wrestling commentators yelling the same phrases over and over. I want to hear dinah and shiva talking and interacting. shiva hasn’t said a goddamn word and dinah only does because she gets flashbacks. the book is allegedly about these two women and yet they get as little agency in how the entire thing is acted out and described as tom could physically manage.

[tbcanary]

i have had the tag “batfam” blocked for about a year now for various reasons (scrolling thru the dinah tag without having to see any bat-centric posts) but at this point i do tend to click on a lot of them because, frankly, the things and people that tag is used for is insane to me. in what world is renee a batfam member. harley? like. those are just women who live and work in gotham.

[chadsuke]

#text.tb#do you get it. do you understand.#he is both their savior and their killer he is the one who takes them in and the one who rejects them#and that’s what makes it INTERESTING#and he does it with EVERYONE. it’s just that most of the other people are adults! and care for themselves!#it doesn’t MATTER if bruce doesn’t want helena here bc helena isn’t his ward#he can make things hard for her but she won’t feel the same stinging rejection (most of the time)#because she’s a grown ass woman capable of caring for herself without his intervention#and that dynamic is amplified and made all the more complex#when the man who doesn’t WANT you to be there#is the one who BROUGHT YOU INTO IT IN THE FIRST PLACE#anyway. god i swear. i swear !!!

like. it’s complicated, right. bruce didn’t want to see dick hurt; he hurt dick trying to prevent it. he tried to save jason’s life; it killed him. he wanted to show steph the right path forward; he pushed her to hurt herself and others. he loves cass and admires her abilities; he pushes her to be more vigilante than human.

(i don’t have a great pithy way to summarize tim or damian or duke or babs, so i won’t try to, but their relationships are similarly complex and difficult with bruce and with the other bats.)

point is, there are no easy dynamics and there is nothing that is purely good, because the vigilantism fucks all of them up, and bruce, as the driving force behind that vigilantism, fucks them up, too. that’s just how it is. and that’s not to say he doesn’t love or care for them, it’s just that he isn’t very good at parenting them, despite being an excellent mentor and teacher in other ways.

[tbcanary]

being a liker of women in comics is the hardest thing in the world. you read one spectacular run about her that rewrites your entire brain and then after that it's like. do you want the run where she's a sexy lamp. the one where she's a generic love interest. the one where she's needlessly infantilized. or the one where her entire backstory is erased in order to make her a surprise villain and evil temptress.

[tbcanary]

can we stop him. can anybody please stop him.

[tbcanary]

it’s early in the morning so i can’t phrase this well but there’s something interesting about rose and jason as people who try to be their own kind of vigilante outside of their father’s influence and yet still have all the visual elements that clearly label them as being That Man’s Kid

[tbcanary]

the thing that drives me crazy about this costume isn’t even necessarily the constant ass shots and the weird way her tits look with that white accent. like, sure, those things drive me insane, but i’ve been dealing with that kind of thing for dinah the entire run, so whatever.

the thing that makes me actually insane is that helena is usually shown to very carefully consider her costumes and both what they represent and what they invoke.

in cry for blood, for example, she draws on visuals of priesthood and faith, because those are very important to her and part of why she does any of this in the first place.

like. sure, it’s kind of a weird costume (affectionate), but it has significance and thought and it works. she’s invoking a theme, she’s making a statement, go off.

and, even earlier, she talks about the idea of using a costume in huntress (1989). the run has a LOT about her relationship to the huntress as an idea — her desire to leave it behind, versus the knowledge that she can’t actually do that. it also includes this panel:

that’s only somewhat related, but you know. she thinks of the huntress as an extension of her cowardice, this sort of monstrous part of her that she struggles with constantly. so the silhouette is very dramatic and wild - the big hair, the huge cape. it fits in thematically.

even when you look at helena wayne, some of these themes carry through. she has a white cross on her chest, it’s drawing on the cross Helena Bertinelli wears at her throat, we see it, etc.

and the birds of prey costume. instead of doing literally any of this. went for a white pattern that kind of invokes a cross, but not really. and. this:

it’s just like. part of a broader issue I have with Simone’s run in that, for all it claims to be feminist and powerful, it really just reduces characters — Helena, in particular — to the sort of catty 2000s mean girl stereotype that was already everywhere. no thought to the depth, no thought to the backstory. just make it hot.

[tbcanary]

obsessed with the way cass and jason mirror and invert each other. cass’s father didn’t want her to be human so he tried to make her a weapon. jason’s dad doesn’t want him to be a weapon so he tried to force him to be more human. and they were both wrong.

[tbcanary]

my main issue with a lot of ongoing runs right now. or. okay i have a number of issues but the one i’m on about right now. is that the visual artists are clearly putting their whole pussy into the characters and the backgrounds and every single aspect. and then the writers are either phoning it in or fucking it up or, even worse, both.

[tbcanary]

i think one of the benefits to older huntress comics is just how brutal she was allowed to be. i know writers later gave her arcs meant to show that she could change and become less violent and more of a team player, but i just love the runs where she’s allowed to be both caring and compassionate and absolutely willing to kill and cross that line when push comes to shove, in part because that’s what sets her apart. she’s tied so closely to the mob and wrapped so tightly in her upbringing and the rules of her family’s world that death to those who cause her harm is not only an option but in fact a logical conclusion.

[tbcanary]

the thing I always forget is that the whole “I trust oracle implicitly despite not knowing who they are” arc of dinahbabs was like. a dozen or so issues. bop (1999) ran for so many years and that particular dynamic was such a small sliver of it. but it was also the best thing it ever did for us, so to me, it feels like it should have been 50-70 issues of just that. the blind trust. the faith. the leaping without looking. what do you mean they knew each other almost the whole time.

[tbcanary]

in retrospect it’s absolutely insane to make dinah the kids’ therapist in the yj cartoon. comics dinah would never. z would be like “my dad is basically dead and I’ll never see him again” and dinah would say “have you tried ruining someone else’s marriage to cope”

[tbcanary]

yeah yeah tom king this tom taylor that geoff johns the other thing. i need people to start recognizing the plague that is scott lobdell.