#the blargle returns...........

[sheepyyyyyy]

Blargle on! It’s Friday! Don’t forget to be yourself!

I sent this early use it whenever you deem funniest

this ask was sent to me in october of 2023. and you know what? i think its finally time........

[dukeofriven]

Batman: No Man’s Land is what made me a Batman fan - and it is equally what made me abandon the “Big Two” comic companies some years later as everything I liked was erased from continuity, Cassie Cain was treated like dog shit, the “Bat Family” became an all-boys club and so on. Given that DC has rebooted everything at least twice I feel my disdain is warranted - you can go on all you like about how Batman is ��an eternal story’ but I firmly believe that  the kind of storytelling I want from Batman cannot survive contact with constant reboots and disregarded continuity. I could live in a world where twenty years from now Batman is retired and his predecessors are living out his ideals in their own way - comics keeps doing this but never lets it stick, the commitment to some platonic ideal of brand identity never letting anything move on. All the stories I’ve loved over the last few decades have largely been serialized ones - I can enjoy non-seralized work, even love it: a good Calvin and Hobbes strip is always timeless. But C&H and DC comics are trying to do very different things - Calvin can stay young forever, I don’t think I really want that from Batman. Every few years my favourite characters all become strangers, or cease to exist, and I’m supposed to just keep reading? Sorry, DC - investing in an ephemeral story subject to the whims of editors hunting more sales and restarting everything because that’ll let “new readers get on board.” Given the ever-falling drop of DC and Marvel comics sales, coupled with the endless hard and soft reboots, I don’t actually think that’s true. i think jumping on to a story with years of depth behind it is wonderful. When Is tarted reading MTMTE I wasn’t put-off that it was the latest entry in a long line of them: I went back and read the entire decade-long run of IDW Transformers comics. And some of it was shit, yeah - but some of it was great, and when i returned to the new stuff all that weight of past actions and people meant something. It gives worlds substance, even if you’ve not read that exact issue being referenced - you know that others have come this way before. All of this is a very long intro to this: I am re-reading all of NML to see if it still holds up - writing, story, all that jazz. And... uh... Oh Jeeze. I forgot about this. This is my old nemesis: Mark Buckingham.

Mark Buckingham has had a very storied career. He’s a decent inker, fine as a colourist blah blah blah - but he... woof. he’s a dreadful penciler. And he’s won lots of awards and renown and I’ve never understood why - because his faces do this thing and it’s the worst. Mark Buckingham first came to my attention when he took over as penciler on issues 6 of Fables. He replaced Lan Medina who did the first five issues and had this wonderful, kind of old-fashioned romance comics style I love, especially his rendering of Snow White:

(Fables #01) Medina left after issue five - no idea why . - eventually snagging an Eisner for it but not, as far as I can tell, much name recognition beyond that, one of those jobbing artists who pencils in relative obscurity, occasional attached to something big but never bestowing much on him. Or maybe he’s huge among those “in the know” -  time on Google came up with a lot of stub articles and the like. Anyways, from issue 6 Mark Buckingham takes over and goes on the pencil the vast majority of the next 145 issues... This is a tragedy, because when Lan Medina drew Bigby Wolf his face... well...it didn’t melt.

These are all from Fables #07, which is the first issue i really started to notice this problem. Most of Buckingham’s work is unobjectionable, but he keeps having these bizarre faces almost always involving Bigby.

Fables 13

Fables 14 Hell let’s jump ahead to:

Fables #50 Fables #50, by the way, is the point at which I really started to question “why the fuck am I still reading this?” It’s the issue where after a big long masturbatory commando raid the Big Bad Wolf turns to the camera and tells Gepetto - but really the audience - the author's opinions on Israel.

It’s as jarring and out-of-place as it looks. If you’re wondering”‘Should I read Fables” the answer depends entirely on how much you enjoy something that isn’t so right-wing that it openly endorses fascism, but just right wing enough to surprise you now and again with something that leaves a nasty taste in your mouth. Fables always feels what would have happened if Frank Miller and Neil Gaiman had been merged into a single being and made an imaginative but reactionary comic book. But all that lay in the future. In 1998 Mark was working of Shadow of the Bat, one of the numerous Batman spin-off that all came together to make Batman: No Man’s Land, including Batman: Shadow of the Bat, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Detective Comics, Azrael: Agent of the Bat (which is shit), Catwoman, Robin, Batman Chronicles, Nightwing, Catwoman, a couple of one-shots like Batman: Huntress & Spoiler, crossovers with Young Justice and JLA, and last but not least, a comic called Batman. (I can’t stress how bad Azrael: Agent of the Bat is. When people make fun of angsty, over-wrought 90s comics, they’re talking at least in part about Azrael. Apparently he made it over to the new Prime universe. No idea why.) And boy - if you thought Fables had a melting problem, let’s look at Shadows of the Bat! (These are are all from #73)

It’s something to do with the mouth - his habit of erasing the middle of it just makes men look like Jim Halpert crossed with Guy Smiley and I hate it.

Oh Jesus, Oracle - eat something, for the love of God, you’re emaciated!

Blargle blargle blargle

This isn’t an example of bad art. I just wanted to note that Anarky is here. Who is that, you ask? He’s a third-rate V rip off who exists because it was the 90s. You don’t care about Anarky. Nobody has ever cared about Anarky. He was supposed to be the third Robin and got dumped - that’s how much nobody cares about Anarky.

Guest appearance by Jim Carrey!

Why is this so god-damn funny?

[drizzled-cake]

BLARGLE HAS RETURNED

[tuiliel]

Hi! I recently found your blog in some tags and I noticed you brought up your husbamd when talking about your companion and mentioned him interacting with one (Sarsha). If you don't mind me asking, how did you manage to find a s/o with youe beliefs? Or how did you bring it up wirh them that you had companions? I often worry if I enter a relationship with someone they won't accept the part of me that participates in such things. Hope this isn't too personal, apologises if it is. Love your blog 💕

Um I’m not sure when you sent this but I’ll tackle it as best I can now. (My notifications have been all effed up again, blargle.)

I started out dating an agnostic Jewish man who was really into fantasy novels, and then I took him to a pagan faery wedding after we’d been dating for like a year and a half, and he Saw Things. I opened up about my beliefs a bit more, we talked with my friends (the ones who’d just gotten married) and he was stoked that magic was real, but remained wary of gods (for a while).

He wanted to learn earth magic, but I wasn’t sure I could teach him because I hadn’t yet really gotten deep into the whys and hows of my own practice. At the time I was mostly an animist witch who vaguely felt pulls but ignored them.A couple months later, we went to FaerieCon East (which is a fantasy con with a strong pagan vibe), and stopped at a Druid grove on the way home. They were finishing up their Sunday services and gave us a warm welcome. We returned soon after and just kept going and then gods called to both of us in ways we couldn’t ignore and I started working more closely with spirits instead of just sort of greeting the locals, and the rest, as they say, is history.

We eventually stopped going to that grove, partly because it’s a 90 minute drive, partly because some of our friends left, but we have some closer friends we practice with now, and perhaps more importantly we have our own hearth practice. We have a room full of shrines and a house full of spirits and our own holiday traditions, and we’re raising a Pagan baby in this faith we deepened together.

I don’t know if that’s a helpful answer, but it’s my truth. May you find your own way to the happiness you seek!