#tim will never let her down for that one and it's become an ongoing joke between them

[dylanconrique]

i've had a dozen wip ideas run through my head since those pics dropped, but the one i'm most hung up on is tim buying lucy a stuffed goat he spots in the hospital gift shop window that she name's "jerald jr" and now i really can't wait to get off work to start writing it. 🥺💕

[triscribeaucollection]

Hi! For the writing asks: ✨ and 🌷?

Hi Crystal! Your timing is perfect, and I'm gonna combine these to ramble about my topic of the evening: Justice League Unlimited plays Wolfen and Warlocks

✨ - newest wip / 🌷 - writing achievement you want to brag about

Some of the stone elementals charged forward to throw punches. Others cracked and split the ground, making it harder to approach them by foot. The biggest one, guarding the portal, created a ring of spikes to better protect it.

And Clark’s friends proved exactly why an RPG was the best choice for them to play, rather than a card or board game.

Wally annoyed different targets into following him into range of Diana’s fists. John pinned others in place for Shayera to strike and destroy. Clark and J’onn cast magical shields and restored health points, keeping everyone else moving, and when Bruce’s fairy reached the others to share what he’d learned about the portal’s crystal power source, the seven of them formed up seamlessly to go after it.

Even better, they all clearly had fun doing so.

And *I* had *immense* fun writing this nonsense, okay?

Picking out races, abilities, and stats for each of the seven, figuring out how to balance them against one another through the game encounter, picking the exact worst possible moment for Bruce roll a 1 and almost hit Wally's character instead of the final boss, which he is absolutely never going to live down, that's gonna become the running joke for however many chapters this thing goes:

Flash: "You missed! He was three feet in front of you, how could you miss-!"

Batman: "Shut. Up."

Flash: =D

But of course I've already determined how I'm going to have more fun with it, by bringing in Zatanna to play Storymaster so Clark isn't pulling double duty. And she gets invested, my dudes, full on spooky voice reading the intro blurbs, using magic to make a veil of mist around her spot at the table, bringing the map and character tokens to life for a bit of flair, so on and so forth

There will be other superheroes who get interested. Further interactions in twos and threes as the game spreads through the League. Robin hears about all this and pesters Batman to teach him to play, and between the two of them at home it basically turns into an extra training exercise, Bruce making use of the 'solve a mystery' aspect woven into most pre-made campaigns to teach Tim some more detective skills (this being the DCAU and not comics continuity)

I might even have Alfred insist on hosting one night, just so he gets to lay eyes on Bruce opening up his walls bit with friends- sorry, *cough*, colleagues. Tim will of course get to join in, and does NOT hesitate to grab the "You Missed!" joke and run with it like the little gremlin he deserves to be. Dick and Babs will be beyond delighted when he lets it slip to them as well >:D

And this is like. Full circle, for me. Rather emotional, when I think about it.

Few years back I was writing a scene for a story in a whole other fandom, and decided the kid main character and his best friend needed to be distracted from ongoing misfortune in the form of a new adult friend teaching them to play a D&D knockoff game. I didn't want to use *actual* Dungeons and Dragons, because where's the fun in that, but I felt I needed some actual Thing to use as reference rather than purely winging it. And thus, Wolfen and Warlocks was born.

Now, rather than making things up as I went along for that fic, I've got the Actual Game to reference, or at least all the materials meant for the first edition of it. Not put together or published, yet, but that's only because I'm still beta testing with the help of various friends - including @yogurtbear242, Player The First who gave the best reactions to unexpected developments and was an all around good sport despite not ever having played a tabletop rpg before, in-person or online:

(Everybody salute Bear for being a wonderful crash test dummy)

And now! I get to put the Justice League's founding members through the same shenanigans!!

Self-indulgence *and* self-promotion at it's finest x)

[arecomicsevengood]

BLACK ORCHIDS, BLUE LILIES, AND BLEEDING HEARTS

I wanted to do a “capsule reviews of random obscurities” type of post. I didn’t anticipate a theme would emerge of how the potential exhibited by unfinished work might be superior to work that concludes in an unsatisfying way.

BLACK ORCHID

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean did a three-issue miniseries reviving a forgotten DC superhero before getting The Sandman off the ground, and while that comic has been kept in print, that’s not what I read. What I got the urge to track down (after seeing pages on Tumblr) was the attempt at an ongoing series circa the 1993 launch of Vertigo that’s never been reprinted, written by a dude, Dick Foreman, who didn’t have much of a career in comics but I believe remained friends with Alan Moore — He was a contributor to Dodgem Logic and (maaaaybe? This is a vague memory) got a shout-out in the From Hell annotations for some kind of research assistance. The first few issues are GREAT. Jill Thompson handles the art, and she really is just a rock-solid storyteller, nailing backgrounds and body language and favoring straightforward grids. The story, as people in the letter column point out, is a Thelma And Louise riff: We’ve got this one woman with hypnotic mind control powers, and we’ve got the woman she’s manipulated into being her best friend, and they’re on the run from an scientific/governmental organization. There’s a supporting cast of likable people established that our hero is implicitly manipulating, generating some tension. Each issue is pretty self-contained, they get into some Vertigo horror/fantasy shenanigans.  One of these is a Swamp Thing crossover, I don’t have the Swamp Thing issue, drawn by Rebecca Guay, who becomes the series’ regular artist once Jill Thompson leaves. Guay is not nearly as solid an artist, and Foreman’s stories get more fantasy-oriented in a way that leaves me cold. It’s cool the creative team abandons any pretense to superheroics, but since the shift in ambition coincides with the loss of a storyteller that can ground it, I may discard all the Guay issues. With Jill Thompson there really is a high level of control over the visual storytelling that allows the writing to do ambitious things, structurally and with language, but also chill out and let moments exist.

Foreman was supposed to do a creator-owned series with Vertigo called The Rites Of Alchemy, illustrated by Paul Johnson, that never came out, though the completed work was posted on a blog maintained by the book’s assistant editor.

The covers are by Dave McKean, really rocking that early nineties 4AD kinda vibe. DC isn’t having his art on the covers of the newer Sandman reprints, favoring an illustration-style approach to the goth vibe. It’s interesting, the design choices of pre-Vertigo really were meant to signal “THIS ISN’T LIKE OTHER COMICS,” but now DC really does want to present that stuff as part  and parcel with what they regularly do. Different times! Comics are more widely accepted culturally, but they’re also a lot worse.

THE BLUE LILY

I think the only person I’ve ever seen talk about this comic is Joe McCulloch tweeting about it. I know Angus McKie as the person who handled computer coloring for Dave Gibbons on the Martha Washington series, I would not have expected his authorial sensibility to be that of a post-underground cartoonist who is making a lot of jokes as he makes a very dense genre pastiche. He also doesn’t over-model the coloring on his own stuff, which would surely make this unreadable. There’s a lot of text on these pages, each issue is 48 pages long. This was originally meant to be a 4-issue miniseries but it got canceled halfway through, but what exists is still fairly satisfying, and somewhat exhausting. Tonally and visually, it’s reminiscent of Mack White or Tim Lane, only doing a noir riff in a science-fiction setting where the private eye is a robot, which is honestly more ambitious than those dudes would do, but the tone is thoughtful and comedic enough that it never tips into that genre mashup style I find so distasteful. McKie is also known for a book published by Heavy Metal (and partially adapted for the movie) called So Beautiful And So Dangerous, but I don’t know anything about that.

STORYTELLER

I came across two (late, non-consecutive) issues of the Barry Windsor-Smith comic Storyteller at cover price in a shop and honestly just wanted to brag about it. Really beautiful color and format. He’s serializing three stories, two of which got conclusions in graphic novel collections Fantagraphics put out. I am going to convince myself I have no interest in being a completist about this work, that reading a graphic novel collection would be unsatisfying on a narrative level, what makes this comic fun is the ambition of it -- I’m interested in seeing the process of BWS trying to get somewhere, less so in where he’s trying to go. All of these things are trying to be comedies to some extent, nothing is as out-and-out dark as Monsters is, and his sense of humor seems kind of dumb. But he’s a really dense storyteller, he’s making sure that every story moves forward on every page, even if it’s sort of incremental or picaresque none of it ever feels like filler. It’s a really ambitious comic but it’s easy to imagine the fans of good comics in 1997 being put off by how the cover of every issue depicts fantasy images of either a viking warrior or a maiden showing her cleavage at way larger dimensions than anything else on the racks. I think of BWS as working a similar vein to Michael Kaluta -- this fantasy style that has seemed out of date the entire time I’ve been reading comics -- Kaluta being who they’ve got doing the covers to the new Sandman trades.

BLEEDING HEART

This was a one-person anthology series Fantagraphics ran in the early nineties by Peter Kuper, whose later Vertigo miniseries The System may have competed with Storyteller for a comic buyer’s dollar. Kuper does a pretty cool style with spray paint over stencils that is as appealing as it is plainly labor-intensive. In The System we get a full color version, though here he just does it in black and white, alongside stuff done with a pen. He’s mostly known as a political cartoonist, one of the founders of World War 3 Illustrated, and he basically connects the lineage between woodcut books and Banksy. Here we also get him doing autobio comics about how he jerks off, that classic early nineties alt-comics comedy routine, that comes off charming here due to the context of Kuper doing enough other stuff to not get pigeon-holed.

BAOBAB

I was trying to figure out if this Igort comic, that had three issues published as part of the Ignatz line co-published by Fantagraphics and Coconino, ever got a conclusion and a book collection in Italy. I didn’t find that out. What I did find was Teddy Kristiansen -- known in the U.S. primarily for this work on Vertigo comics like Sandman -- rating each issues 5 stars on Goodreads. I wouldn’t have thought to make that associative leap, although Joe McCulloch, writing about his issue of Solo, did compare one story to the Loustal/Paringaux collaborations. Baobab is beautiful: A story of comics in the early twentieth century, evolving in parallel across continents with different visual traditions, that really works the angle that the way to pay homage to Feininger and Herriman is to experiment with visual language. A plot point, that newspaper serialization can be interrupted by political events, roughly foreshadows the story’s interrupted and abbreviated form. That a work in progress can nonetheless engage its readers is explicitly text here. I still think there is likely a great number of greater effects a work of this caliber and ambition could achieve were it to come to a conclusion, but for now I’ll have to seek the potential narrative satisfaction that would follow from finding a copy of the first issue, which I still have yet to track down.

[novantinuum]

jen’s doctor who s11 review

On the whole!

I really enjoyed series 11 for its nice change in pace and especially the relationship built up between Graham and Ryan. I really liked how many of the episodes were lighter and kinda more adventure-y in nature than in past, instead of constant “the world is gonna end” danger. Like I love those kinds of episodes, believe me, but the lighter tone is very welcomed after many series of heart wrenching angst ahahahah! 

I loved how they handled the historical episodes this series, and really dug into the truth of human condition within those time periods, and took risks there. I actually learned a lot about the time periods they visited- for example, I never really heard much about the Pakistan partition in school. 

Thirteen is precious and I want to hug her. She’s so full of hope and that makes me so happy! :DDD I love how she’s a sciency tinkerer and likes cobbling stuff together out of whatever loose ends she can find. I’m still waiting for her to snap, though- maybe that’s just me as an angst lord talking, but I want to see her super super angry. The scene in The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos with her sternly disagreeing with Graham was very good though. But anyways, I love her positivity and her quirky alien charm, and her character feels like a natural progression of where the Doctor left off at the end of Twice Upon a Time. The Doctor has gone through a lot of healing since the Time War, a lot of self reflection and forgiving themself, and Thirteen is absolutely a product of that and it shows. It’s so nice to see them back on their feet, unshackled by that guilt finally, just wandering about the universe like they always did. 

Yasmin is so sweet and so loyal, and h o h boy if there’s anyone I can see sticking with the Doctor until the bitter end out of this crew it’s her. (*nervous laughter*) Out of all the crew she’s the one who’s had the least development though, so I’m looking forward to seeing where she goes as a character moving forward. Also, I hope we see her family more, I like them! Maybe in the New Years special, we’ll see. I’ve absolutely hit the “ADOPT KID” button on Ryan, the more I think about him the more I love him- just, all this time he’s been looking for belonging, for people who aren’t gonna leave him behind like his dad, and he had that with his nan Grace- but he didn’t know if Graham was gonna be the same or if he was only there for him bc of association with Grace. But now through all these adventures through space and time he has absolute proof that Graham will be there for him, and so he’s made the conscious decision to make Graham his family. And Graham, hhh... his grieving throughout the series, while not acting as a shadow on it, was always woven through and it’s nice to see both him and Ryan actually make peace with things through seeing Tim Shaw again and giving him his humble pie. 

In the end when it comes to this series, I love the strong found family vibes it gives. Graham and Ryan and Yaz, they all knew each other in some way before, but they didn’t truly know each other. And through being thrown together with the Doctor, entering her wild adventurous life, they got to grow closer as friends, but more importantly, as a family. The whole series the Doctor was looking for a word to describe her little ragtag group, and she wasn’t exactly sure if “fam” was the right one, but in the end it’s what she settles on because this has become a family. 

Now, what I’m hoping to see more of in the future! 

1) I’d love to see more extended domestic-y TARDIS scenes! We’ve got a lot of pre/post endcap TARDIS scenes, but I’d love to see more small little convos between characters on the way to their destinations, in between, etc. For as long as these episodes were I feel like so much time was spent providing exposition and story for the plot, but I’d love to see more fun nonsense. More glimpses at what they get up to in between, if that makes any sense. (As an example of what I mean, we got a bit of this in The Tsuranga Conundrum, at the very beginning when they were just poking about a junkyard planet, and I quite liked that.)

2) As the characters keep developing I’d love to see more conflict arise between them to test their friendships. We saw some good moments of this with the Doctor telling Ryan to stay behind with Hanne in It Takes You Away after he made a kinda narrow-minded comment about her disability, and when the Doctor flat out told Graham that if he killed Tim Shaw he wouldn’t be traveling with her anymore in the finale. I’d love to see more of this.

3) This may just be because I’m really queer, but I want the Doctor to snap and yell and get really angry at something. That’s the ONE thing that felt entirely missing from this series. In the end I get the sense that this Doctor has a far greater reign on her emotions and self because she’s healed quite a bit, but I still know she’s capable of that righteous anger and I’d love to see Jodie show off her full range with a scene like that.

4) We’ll probably get this in the New Years special, but I’m super anticipating Thirteen facing the Daleks. This is a quintessential thing for every Doctor, in my opinion, and I can’t wait for when they (hopefully!) eventually do that.

5) More of a plot arc. I definitely know the lack of a tight plot arc was because they wanted it to be more accessible for people to just tune in and watch without context,, as they’re gaining some new fans, but I hope that there’s more of a return to an ongoing series plot arc with this next series since everything’s been established. I personally really like those, because I get to be a plot arc detective! I will say that I’m very pleased that Tim Shaw was brought back for the finale, though- that acted as a very nice bookend and helped tie up all the emotional threads.

6) Also not exactly anything I can fault this series for, because I can tell one of the points/themes of it was “not everything is what it seems on the surface” and “sometimes the real monsters,,, are humanity” and I very much respect that, but I do wanna see some more just... alien baddies who ARE baddies and not misunderstood. Listen,, I’m a simple minded person. Love me some monsters! 

My rankings! 

For context, I’m generally very easy with my ratings. I’m not rating them on how critically perfect they are as plots or anything, this is purely based on how much I enjoyed them. I’ve only actually rated nine episodes of Doctor Who 2005-present with scores of 6 or below.

10- Absolutely SUPERB  9- Excellent! 8- Great! 7- Good 6- Okay

1) Demons of the Punjab    (10) This ep made me cry more than any episode of Doctor Who has in a very long time. Incredibly poignant, stunning music and cinematography. Taught me a whole lot I never knew about the partition and how it affected everyday people. I liked how the Doctor assumed the whole time that these aliens were  A good Yaz centric ep, too. It ranks 7th in my list of all-time favorites.  

2) It Takes You Away   (9.5) Wowee, another very poignant one! Some FANTASTIC acting from Jodie in this ep, and a very trippy concept with the sentient universe. Loved getting to see each companion getting a good role to play. ALSO CAN WE JUST TALK ABOUT HOW MUCH I STAN THAT FROG??? AND THE DOCTOR SEDUCING AN ENTIRE UNIVERSE???? B R U H. Hanne’s actress did a wonderful job too! 

3) Kerblam!   (9) What a heckin fun episode! This one will definitely become one of my comfort eps, I can already tell. The secondary characters were all lovely, and the bots were delightfully unsettling too! I spent the whole thing going “wow I totally experienced this working at Amazon” and I thought that was pretty funny. Also, I might highlight all the wonderful Graham snark we got in this one. 

4) Rosa    (9) Gahhh this was a hard one to watch, but very truthful in its depiction of the time period, and a lovely tribute to an incredibly courageous woman. Shout out to how the ep forced Graham to recognize and accept his white privilege (and the Doctor too for that matter), the scene with Ryan and Yaz discussing racism they’ve had to endure, and also for the scene with the Doctor making jokes about Banksy. That made me laugh. “Banksy doesn’t have one of these! Or do I?”

5) The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos    (9) I was VERY glad to see Tim Shaw return for some finished business, and how it allowed Graham and Ryan to finally get a bit of peace for what happened to Grace because of him. This was a solid ep, with some SOLID character moments between Graham and the Doctor and Graham and Ryan. The Ux were interesting, too.

6) The Woman Who Fell to Earth    (8.5) Solid, fun episode. It wastes no time in setting up who Thirteen will be. Still one of my favorite scenes in this whole series so far is when she builds her own sonic screwdriver- GOD the music there is so damn iconic. And gahhh I love Grace so much. How dare they make me love a character so much and then let her die? Rude. That’s homophobia. XD

7) The Witchfinders   (8.5) The Doctor gets dunked in water and has soaked hair. Dare I say more? No, but I was glad to see an ep with an alien danger that actually IS an alien danger that seeks to destroy and conquer, I always love those- and this one, with weird sentient mud that can fill corpses, was delightfully grim. Willow was a great secondary character, too- loved her especially. 8) The Ghost Monument   (8) Okay so I really loved how slice-of-life this episode was? We actually got to know our secondary characters Angstrom and Epzo and I appreciated that. The bit with the Doctor thinking the TARDIS was gone forever at the end... hhhhhhng... that was such a good scene. You could just see the hope drained from her face, and then to see it all rush back as she finally found her?? W o w I’m so emo, y’all ;D;

9) The Tsuranga Conundrum  (7) So I enjoyed this one, but there were some kinda oddly phrased bits of dialogue in it that marks it down for me. The Pting is a delightfully weird and cursed creature, 10/10, would yeet out of a spacecraft. I already mentioned this, but I LOVE the scene in the junkyard and how slice-of-life it was. I also appreciate how someone called out the Doctor on being selfish during this. 10) Arachnids in the UK   (6.5) So this episode was riding right on the edge of “ehh” for me, but it still has some great moments in it, with the Doctor awkwardly interacting with Yasmin’s family and all those heckin spiders bee-boppin down the hallways to the tune of rap music. XD I can’t exactly pick out why it was an “eh” for me, but it just didn’t click. Maybe I was just hoping it’d be an alien thing and was kinda left wanting with the way the episode felt kinda... unfinished. Like, there’s still a bunch of giant spiders? They didn’t solve that. They just- trapped them and left. I dunno I was left wanting with this ep.