Just the start of it all

You might be able to tell that as well as The Internet, I have spent today catching up on comics. I can't find anyone talking about this in the places I might have expected to on LJ, but maybe I'm just being faily at looking. I'm pleased, though, because IDW have finally got done something right with the Who franchise! Hurrah!

( The rest of this is very spoilery )

But anyway, good stuff, yes. I hope the other five IDW one-shots are of a similar standard.

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

kseda gave me:

( Anji Kapoor )

( sizeofthatthing )

( my favourite comic book artist )

( how awesome my username is )

( pie )

(If you want to comment without being tagged for the meme, just say. If you do want to be tagged, be aware I may be offline for a while because I am probably about to switch off my router until I have finished this thrice-damned fic that doing this meme was blatant procrastination from.)

Dear Marvel,

I am totally over-the-moon happy that you have started giving work to Jamie McKelvie because he is amazing. I can assure you that I would never have bothered with Cable #11 without his involvement. But please could you start giving him colourists who are more simpatico with his style? It's very clean and minimalist and expressive in its simplicity and when you put too much fussiness into the colouring it detracts from that. The difference between the lineart I saw on Newsarama-or-wherever for his Nightcrawler story in that X Men thing and the finished product was a bit depressing, and with Cable it is even worse. I would say check out Suburban Glamour for how to Do It Right, but you must have already seen it, so you already know. Seriously, it's like hiring Michaelangelo to paint your chapel and handing him a roller-brush.

Love,
Me

PS If you let Bendis permanently dethrone Doc Strange as Sorceror Supreme, I will ... moan about it on the Internet. A lot.

Things I was tempted to spam you about in the last week or so, all in one handy post.

1. I know it's deeply tedious to LJ about having trouble getting onto LJ, but the servers are significantly less robust since the move, y/y?
   
2. I liked the remake of Terry Nation's One Other Good Idea Survivors, myself. ( minor spoilers for the opener, haven't seen #2 yet )
   
3. I have been thinking about the tendency of bad fic to drive out good, which is a pattern I've seen in pretty much every comm I'm familiar with that's even slightly active. ( Cut for length and a biggish image )
   
4. I'm going to cop to this one publicly rather than on my filter because I'm quite proud of it: I wrote TARDIS/Sapphire for the kink meme and here it will be on Teaspoon. (YAY! The 'spoon lets you do colours! I'm so glad I have any sort of self-restraint at all, or all my fics would turn into rainbows or something.)
   
5. I am thinking about rewatching S1 of New Who properly all the way through soon to see how it holds up. I liked it at the time for being new Doctor Who on the telly but I have always hated Nine's inability to take the tough choice, which is pretty much his defining character trait as far as I'm concerned and the thing that gets him killed. And also the arbitrary "this person > that person" thing which I had issues with ever since Mickey in Rose. If I do should I post about it, or would it become tedious and be too likely to be hatey? (I may rediscover all the things I enjoyed first time round, or I may notice lots of stuff that prefigures RTD's patterns of fail that weren't obvious as patterns at the time.)
   
6. I keep getting in fights on who_anon with people who tell me I'm an emotionless drone who cannot appreciate any modern TV, just because I think the emo in new Who is overdone. ( cut for length again and spoilers for Spooks and Survivors and all sorts of stuff )
   
7. Manufactured American girlpop seems to be having a very good run at the moment. Or my ability to have any discernment whatsoever has jumped straight out of a twentieth-floor window. One of the two. The worst part is that I really like Katy Perry's new song and am now trying to work out whether Kissed A Girl is really objectionable or not.
   
8. OTOH: oh, god, James Blunt is so annoying. His songs are bad enough but when he's being interviewed he's so vapid. He's just saying all the standard "I just do my thing and if anyone else likes it that's a bonus" stuff, but he comes across so smug. I should know better than to watch E4 Music when they're not just putting videos on.
   
9. Comics! Angel: After the Fall has finally started to make something resembling sense, inasmuch as we've found out what various people are up to. I am bloody well going to have to reread it from the beginning, aren't I? Also, there are lots of good comics coming out tomorrow. I'm a bit grumpy that the release schedules of Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy have aligned, as it means I get all my Cosmic Marvel at once instead of nicely spread out through the month. Also, there is new Blue Beetle! I still can't believe that's been cancelled. Woe. Does anyone know many more we're getting? (My one Blue Beetle icon, let me show you it.)
   
10. I am going to catch up on SJA now. ( Cut because I am talking about a spoiler I know in advance )
    

There are some major spoilers here.

( Quantum of Solace )

( Spike: After the Fall #4 )

( Rage of the Red Lanterns )

( Nova #18 )

( Campaign )

{*} There is a part of me that is forever stuck in rad v trad debates that I didn't actually ever participate in. Sad, I know.

( ETA: Spoooooks )

OK, so until just now I never thought I'd stop reading a comic to hug it to my chest because one of the characters had just revealed something heart-meltingly lovely.

And I never, ever thought the character in question would be Drax. ( Tiny Guardians of the Galaxy spoiler. )

Also, yay for staying in hotels with actual proper fast wireless broadband. (Almost 10MB! It is liken unto a dream.) I shall probably eschew the delights of sightseeing and stuff for being able to watch the iPlayer properly. Sad, sad me.

ETA: OMHFG, it's downloading the whole of last night's Silent Witness in less than ten mins. Is there anything at all the BBC have done in the last seven days that I should be d/ling? (Also, I am going to have to catch up on SJA, what with having discovered that I missed the window to get Day of the Clown pt1, I shall have to watch Last Sontaran so I can then watch that from here where it won't stutter.) The only thing that's slow is connecting to my BTish webmail facility. The hotel's supplied by Virgin, so what I want to know is who thinks they're making whom look bad?

... though probably it's old news to everyone who might care.

It's Alan Moore's notes for a big DC crossover event that never happened some short time after Watchmen which ties everything up by showing a big future for the whole universe.

I really like the time paradox and John Constantine bits, and the resolution to the initial mystery/big twist is clever, and the things that are no longer big parts of the DCU that he feels the need to tie in are quite interesting from an historical point of view, but the actual future world turns out to be that rare thing, a dystopic what if I don't like. And I discover that despite my Marvel Zombie-ism I do think the core DC characters ought to be shinier and less sordid than that, even in a dystopic WI.

(And no, I don't ever plan to read Kingdom Come.)

This post is not about S Club 7 (though of The People I Like In The Dancing, Rachel is the only one with half a chance, except she's going to fall victim to a mid-series "she already had dancing training in her background even if it wasn't ballroom/Latin" backlash).

No, this post is about exactly how awesome Blue Beetle is.

( Khaji Da! )

( 'Doctor Who' #6 )

( Doctor Who: The Forgotten #1 )

( New Avengers #I've forgotten already )

( Blue Beetle #31 )

And still to read: Nova, WHICH LOOKS AWESOME; Deadpool (er, yeah, #1 did not convince me -- not a patch on Nicieza's take on him in Cable and ... -- but I'm giving it a chance because I <3 him so); Black Panther which I only ever read on crossovers (Secret Invasion T'Challa: not as awesome as Civil War owns-all-the-idiots T'Challa but still fairly cool); and Fantastic Four: True Story, which is very indulgent but I am in a good mood with Paul Cornell this month and I'm cheap for this sort of metafiction.

1. The Fall Fandom Free for All is a fantastic idea, a multi-fandom exchange of anything and everything running for the next two months. I already have, thanks to the unbelievable awesomeness of doyle_sb4, this here icon of Izzy and Fey kissing at the end of Oblivion. It is so shiny, you guys. Also, I am really looking forward to doing the things I've signed up for, though they're going to have to wait in line behind bluesuit_fic (which I have finally come up with a plot for, hurrah) and dw_femslash. (My requests are here, if any of you are feeling ultra kind. I really would love some proper Bonekickers meta, btw. There are so many different things you could go into: the show's schizoid gender poltiics; the phallocentricity of The Sword; the way the relationships between the core cast are like archaeology in and of themselves, layers and layers all built up on top of their earlier history; how plausible the conspiracy theory is or isn't. Or it could just be canon trufax proof of Gillian's kinkiness, I'd be down with that too.)

2. Even if you are the sort of person who never ever reads comics, you must read Y: The Last Man. It is unbelievably good, and I don't have time to rave on about it at the length I want to but OMG so very very good indeed and well worth looking at. Hell, it's gorgeous to look at: Pia Guerra is an amazing artist and I cannot wait to see her work on the new DW comic. I finally managed to get hold of the last four books of Y and devoured them all in less than 24 hours. (I almost cried at the big spoiler near the end, though weirdly enough Peter David's She Hulk managed to make me actually cry, which I was really not expecting. Incidentally, David has so been watching Torchwood: ( spoilers for the She-Hulk: Jaded collection ))

So, as any fule kno, Doctor Who is full to the brim with gayness, and the companions have been femslashing it up with their co-stars since forever. It runs through old school from Susan and Ping Cho in Marco Polo to Ace and Karra in had-to-have-subtext-taken-out-and-there's-still-loads-in-there Survival, and new school's full of it too; Rose's chemistry with the female guest stars is semi-legendary, and allegedly once upon an early planning stage Martha was supposed to be a lesbian. (I would love to be able to take a peek into the parallel universe where that happened, I really would.)

But given that they didn't go that way with Martha, the only place where it's been properly fully canonical is the DWM comic strip. So here is me burbling about it, partly because it's International Day of Femslash, partly because I really, really want Izzy/Destrii fic to exist and am too lazy to write it myself, and partly because someone on the anon meme asked where they can get hold of it. (Answer to which is: I don't know, if you're talking about what I think you're talking about, but there are Amazon links herein. It's worth it!)

( Pictures, spoilers, a lot of incoherent babbling and deprecated img-tag attributes below the cut )

So, tomorrow is going to be on the long and annoying side as my days go at the moment (i.e. actually perfectly fine), and I ought to be spending my time now preparing stuff instead of LJing, but this is sort of by way of being a promise to myself about what my reward is when I get through to the other side of it crossed with persuading myself not to do the stupid thing of not doing any preparation and staying up too late reading instead.

Because as soon as I finally get out of work tomorrow I'm heading straight down the road to Starbucks, and am going to sit in their comfiest chair and continually replenish my supply of horrifically calorific drinks until I finish reading:

( Large image of what I'm going to read and squee about it under cut )

(Guardians of the Galaxy #2 was good. I shall have to do a big Cosmic Marvel Is Awesome pimp post at some point because some of you would really enjoy all the stuff they've done recently.)

So, this week I have been mostly reading the kink meme The World Shapers, the latest collection of comic strips from '80s DWM, the second and final featuring Six if I understand it all correctly. In the last year or so, I've read all of the collections available and they've all been good fun (and I ♥ the Eight ones in particular, there is not nearly enough love in fandom for his third strand of continuity). But this one is particularly interesting in terms of how it ties into the show at the time. The collection starts about half way through the hiatus, as best I can tell, and ends with the last Six story before Seven takes over. So I thought I'd bibble on about it. Mainly because it turns out Grant Morrison of all people is like the John the Baptist to the Fanwank Jesus that was Craig Hinton. Seriously and for true, and I'd never ever have guessed.

( cut for penguins )

Meanwhile, in this week's comics: Booster Gold made me cry like a K/S shipper watching Wrath of Khan dammit (and also I now has Jaime-Reyes-Blue-Beetle spec that would sad me if it's true), GLC was a bit disappointing being all exposition and setup and rather betraying the cover which led me to expect UNEXPECTED INSPIRING GUY GARDNER SPEECH (Guy keeps doing it these days, but it's always unexpected for me), Angel: After the Fall has run out of interesting characters to flashback to apart from Gunn, who just leaves me with lots of unexpected questions, and Captain Britain and MI-13 was splendid, well done that Cornell.

Many, many things making me happy right now.

Firstly, a fic rec from sizeofthatthing: someone wrote my Fitz/Trix dressy-up-sex prompt and made it amazing.

Last night when doing my comics shopping I stumbled across the latest collection of Six strips from DWM, The World Shapers, which for some reason I was convinced wasn't going to be out for aaaages. So now I have MOAR FROBISHER to look forward to, as well as very-early-Grant-Morrison-does-the-Time-Lords. And also, there was Suburban Glamour by jamiemckelvie in trade. You may remember I think SG is the bestest thing ever ever ever and you all should read it. (It's about a teenage girl in a sleepy English town who discovers that her life really is stranger than she thought, but, y'know, in an absolutely brilliant way.) The trade is very attractively priced (I picked it up for £6.50) so you should buy it, but just to show you all how sincere I am about that you-all-should-read-it bit, I am quite happy to give it away ('cos I already have the individual issues) to anyone who wants it. Comment here to say so. If more than one of you wants it I'll flip some coins or something.

And this week's comics (well, and last week's, I didn't get to my LCS last week) also turn out to be awesome! I shall do these in bullet points with cuts. And then I might do some numbered questions, in remembrance of Deadpool. No, not really, that would just be too nerdy.

• ( Buffy S8 #15 - GIANT spoilers )
  
• ( Secret Invasion #3 and New Avengers #41 )
  
• ( Final Crisis #1 )
  

And I haven't even had time to read Nova-fights-the-Silver-Surfer or Blue-Beetle-goes-on-a-date-with-Traci-in-Hell yet. But I am sure they will be bringing me much joy too. All in all, I am very happy right now.

OMG, you mean Kl'rt is a Skrull?

( Annihilation: Conquest #6 )

For the record, I am very excited about Guardians of the Galaxy, which is basically an ongoing version of Annihilation. So excited that not even Adam Warlock's presence can dent my squee.

( Suburban Glamour #4 )

( Buffy S8 #13 )

( Mighty Avengers #12 )

I also read the trade of that Cornell chappy's ( Wisdom )

Oh, and I've been catching up on Blue Beetle in trade. I love Jaime, I really really do. And Brenda. And Paco. And Jaime/Traci (that phone call where she's advising him whilst engaged in a sword fight with a skeleton was completely for the win). Best teen superheroics since Buffy S1-3.