thedeadlyhook | Birthdays! and Links and Season 8 Comic Stuff

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Birthdays! and Links and Season 8 Comic Stuff

Okay, so either I am stupid, or LJ has made it harder to find out when people's birthdays are. It was about the only thing I liked about that "My LJ" page, that it had a quick list for b-days. So unless I figure out this new damn system, I'm probably doomed to be eternally clueless and behind.

That said...

A Belated Very Happy Birthday to

irfikos and

azdak!!!

In other news, it's been one of those weeks in which I keep stumbling across fascinating conversations at the precise moments when I have the least amount of energy for talking. I'm going to have to get in the habit of just linking when this happens, because at least then I'll remember what smart people got up to while I was out of commission feeling stupid.

rahirah had a great post about character positioning - alpha/beta, dom/sub, etc. - and there's some great followup in the comments about fanfic's tendencies toward portraying 'ships along those lines, whether the canon (when applicable) supports it or not. Food for thought there about what kind of power dynamics writers and readers are drawn to, or respond to.

I have to admit here I wasn't originally intending to read the Buffy Season 8 comic (insert belly laugh here about how "canon" I consider these comics), but Toys wanted to see it, so we've checked out the first two issues, and I have been enjoying talking about it through various posts on my flist, so at least I've gotten that much out of it.

molly_may has said most of what I wanted to say about issue 2 here, although I'll add a couple more cents in easy bullet form:

I've got feminist issues!

• For a comic entitled "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," there's not all that much Buffy in it.* There is, however, a whole lot of Xander, who is portrayed as all kinds of awesome in a way that smells very wish-fulfill-y.

• Buffy, on the other hand, still has her issues. And so does Dawn. And so does Amy. Perhaps Willow will have no issues when she shows up, but then that just disturbs me for the same reason as Xander having none - why, pray tell, are all the women (so far) angsting about their feelings while the men are shown as calm and collected? (Except for, of course, the villains - the villainous male general is kind of emo. Which leads us to what possible question about emo...?)

• The new Slayers are portrayed as an army of voiceless grunts. Of the couple that have lines, the topic of convo is how dreamy Xander is. (Said girl-with-crush is then stabbed in the back by a zombie a couple of panels later, so both the Scoobie romantic curse and the trend of killing off any Potential/New!Slayer the minute they become interesting and/or likeable still holds.)

• Xander plays Captain Kirk on the bridge while superpowered Slayers operate the consoles. Um, do I really need to point out that this is like Wonder Woman being asked to do the housekeeping around the Justice League HQ? Has adding all these new Slayers really "changed the world," or not?

• Slayers have a pointless gang melee session, apparently for Giles's amusement as he looks on, popelike, from a balcony. Buffy then takes over with a Slayer kung-fu master class in classic Buffyspeak, but the progression unfortunately codes this as Giles being very much in charge, or at least leading an entirely different group of Slayers in a different location. It's unclear.

• Andrew holds court with new young Slayers. Okay, now that's three men shown in leadership positions over an all-female superhero group. Mmmmmm.... smell that empowerment. **

• A legitimate question about why Slayers don't use guns is dismissed with a flip one-liner. Sorry; it's still a legitimate question. If demons aren't bulletproof, then there has to be some other reason for not using guns. Distance from opponent = less casualties. (Wanna guess my issues with a possible plotline in which an unstable army of women can't be trusted with projectile weapons because they're filled with eeevil darkside forces?)

*I also have yet to see a vampire slain.
** Also, let us not forget: Andrew = demon-summoning guy, accessory to murder and attempted rape, who has never served a moment of jail time. Right, great choice there.

So, there you have it. A lot of these questions could be addressed in the long run of the story, but as I've probably groused in other places at other times, I have issues in general with the current trend in comics of writing for the trade paperback compilation. Joss loves playing the fakeout card; he loves turnabout, but in TV, those sorts of revelations are handled over a week-to-week basis. In comics, those same fake-outs and set-ups and red herrings and ooh-who-is-that sly little teasers are stretched out over months. And as a hoary old-time comic fan, I find this approach kind of tiring: it's not just asking me to be ready revise my world view on demand, but also to do it in slo-mo. Is it too much to ask, I wonder, to make it unambiguous that the girls are the heroes?

[/rant]

Some art criticism:

• Nobody seems to be able to draw Giles. I've never seen a good comic rendition of him.

• Andrew is also unrecognizable, but the artist at least seems to have settled on portraying him as Jimmy Olsen, or a close facsimile.

• There are no fat Slayers. Or really any attempts at giving them unique personal looks beyond generic hot!girl, which kind of makes them all blend together into Redshirt territory; a bad sign for future plot developments (see above for possible dire fate of crushing-on-Xander girl).

• Real failure on the artist's part with Amy; it would've been clearer what was going on in the story during her attack on Buffy if she was showing off some kind of magic powers, hovering or surrounded by a glow... anything that might've explained why everyone didn't immediately jump her shit instead of just standing there talking.

Finally, some speculation:

• I'm willing to bet Dawn saves the day against the zombies because hey, giant. Or rather, that's what I would do. It would be nice, anyhow.

• Also willing to bet this Sleeping Beauty-style "true love kiss" thing is going to be resolved by either a) a kiss from Dawn, Willow, or (ack!!) Andrew (assuming he's even in the area - let me add another critique in that it's hard to tell where any of these scenes are taking place - or b) some kind of twofer in which Xander kisses her in the real world at the same time she gets smooched by her dream image of whoever-it-is that's calling her "my love," so we don't know which one broke the spell.

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Amen. I am missing "focus on the Buffy!" moments. Thanks for the link to Molly May, too! I was really kind of freaked out by Bondage Fantasy Buffy, and I'm glad to see that others are as well.

I'd kind of expected the art to get exploitative fairly fast - the setup of a vast army of superwomen just leans too heavily into Grindhouse territory for any male comic artist to resist, I think - but I was surprised at the way JW immediately zoomed in on Buffy's sexual issues and lonlieness and estrangement from her sister instead of establishing the new girls as butt-kickers and empowered tough chicks. So far, it's been a total Xander love-fest, not a Buffy one.

Yeah, what is it with Joss suddenly rediscovering Xander after 2 years of more or less ignoring him in canon??? Methinks he's been reading NWHepcat and has a case of Xander-envy.

All I can think is that once he got the eyepatch, it was "hey, I've got a NIck Fury Jr." to play with, a similarity which of course has been pointed out both in the show and comics now. And from there, easy step to the be-all figure that knows how to do everything.

Well, as I pointed out in a comment to someone else's post, Xander was a sort of Marty Stu at the beginning, so it stands to reason he'd be one again.

I found your points very salient.
I also found the cuts and displacements of this issue very confusing. My respect for Joss as a comics writer isn't all that high--I was underwhelmed by his X-Men too, not that I had a lot else to compare it with.

Comics have undergone a lot of major stylistic changes since I started reading them, but the biggest is the change to the "arc" format, which grew up around the same time as it did on TV (amazing to remember that TV shows didn't used to work a season as a chaptered story, but they didn't - not even early BtVS did that, so it's recent). And like television, which can be caught up to later on DVD, the trade paperback collection is seen as the endpoint for these types of stories... only what's getting lost in the process is the same stuff I'm missing in television: the story that's complete in itself, clarity and consistency of characters as symbols, and a whole lexicon of comics "language" tools that new creators forget to use because they've fallen out of fashion. New readers can't just pick up a comic and enjoy it - you have to commit to someone's vision, which to me takes a lot of the fun out of surprise in finding quality in "disposable" entertainment. Essentially, comics are being turned into novels with pictures, and while I like novels, they're not comics, nor should they be.

Gah, sorry about the comics lecture. It's a subject near and dear to me.

Don't apologize, you're always interesting when you rant a little.

And as a reader of many many comics in the early to mid-1970s, I know exactly what you mean about the arc thing.

I didn't find his x-men to be that great, either. The first 4 issues were awesome, but after that everything fell into ho-hum.

Although the dialog is still better than most comics out there nowadays.

Dialog is something I have an uneasy relationship with as a measure of quality - I've seen some pretty excrebile horror films that nonetheless had punchy dialog; obviously Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith have made a careers out of zingy dialog, but to varying degrees of story relevance... overall, I tend to view good dialog as a very welcome frosting, but I still demand the cake, you know?

I'm trying to think of what I'd call examples of really good comics dialog, and they are rare - in general, it seems to be a medium more tooled to emotions and ideas and extreme information compression, which can lead to some very silly and contorted dialog. (I have real fondness for early Stan Lee-speak, but it's by no stretch of the imagination "naturalistic.") Brit comics like Judge Dredd have an ear for zingers and my onw personal favorite strip, Modesty Blaise, has a very distinctive style, but neither of those really count as current titles.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the decreased amount of Xander in the final seasons was due to actor issues, and that we'd have seen a lot more of the guy otherwise. Now I'm starting to feel grateful we didn't.

Hookles already covered most of my reactions, I think. I enjoyed the first issue but the second one is heading into Queen of the Slayers territory pretty fast, sidelining its female heroes and treating the "empowered" Potentials as an army of jailbait redshirts. Or maybe I just hates me some Andrew.

Ah, Brendon's alcohol problems had slipped my mind. True.

I always liked Andrew on the show(s) but he's too motor-mouthy and self-referential here so far. I had no idea what he was jabbering about.

I bookmarked these two links to track birthdays...

http://www.livejournal.com/birthdays.bml

http://www.livejournal.com/portal/

Thank you! That was really bugging me, that I couldn't even figure out where they'd stashed the listing. It's under "tools"? Sheesh.

I bet Mysterious Black Coat Dream Guy turns out to be Dracula.

The dialogue does seem Dracula-like. And it would be the sort of fakeout I'd expect.

Interesting!
Maybe so.

I'm pretty sure it's not Angel or Spike, anyhow.

I'd be super-surprised if it was Angel or Spike; it just seems too obvious. I'll bet on either Dracula, which would be the outright gotcha! move, or some kind of composite figure, which would at least be an attempt at getting into Buffy's feelings about the two. Although given Joss's sensitivity on that kind of subject, I'm nervous even thinking about that.

Okay, so either I am stupid, or LJ has made it harder to find out when people's birthdays are.
Well,

adzak's birthday isn't listed - I strongarmed it out of her today and it was in March. But the birthday list on my LJ is above the calendar when I go to my Friends pages.

Thank you for strongarming! I mean, I want to be able to wish people happy birthday, you know?

So how do I set it up so the birthday list appears on my LJ like you have? I don't see an option for it in the page layout, but I'm probably just looking in the wrong place.

Good question but I don't have an answer, it's just there. And yes, I also bitterly miss "My LJ" - everything was so nicely laid out.
I mean, I want to be able to wish people happy birthday, you know?
Yeah, half the time somebody on my flist somehow knows when another member has a birthday and then I have to scramble around in my cake file.

Aw, well, thanks for letting me know. I'll see if I can puzzle it out.

Can I say again how impressed I am by your cake files?

In fact, it's a disappointment so far on so many levels that all one can do is laugh really.

Great review.

I'd never really bought into the idea of the comics being a continuation we could all swear by, and this current story is just reminding me that even if Joss plans an eleventh-hour gotcha that will answer every question, we'll still have months of this kind of thing to look forward to as setup.

I am disturbed by the male leadership in the comics as well. However, I'm not sure that this is actually intended to be an ideal situation. We have already had hints dropped that Andrew was responsible for some kind of catastrophic failure through tactical naivety and irresponsibility, and his dismissal of firearms here is flatly contradicted by the use of guns by Buffy and her team in the first issue.

I would personally guess that, despite the problems it causes for the Lineage episode of Angel S5, we're meant to be seeing that the First's crew really were completely effective in massacring every person even tangentially associated with the WC except Giles (my personal fanon is still that Giles was being kept as potentially corruptible into a Caleb-replacement if one became necessary). And that all potentials considered too old to be activated became Watchers and were massacred, which explains who to my surprise and disappointment we're seeing all the Slayers as very young women. So we really are seeing an extremely new and inexperienced organisation in which the male Scoobies and semi-Scoobies have been pulled into leadership positions along with Buffy and Willow because they're the only people with experience, which works on a logistical level even if it fucks up the feminist metaphor.

Now what I'm worried about is whether Joss realises this about the feminist metaphor and will show things being corrected, or whether he doesn't realise it and thinks this is an ideal, as a result of the rather juvenile "never trust anyone who looks over thirty or organisations of more than four people" attitudes that crept into late Buffy and Angel and messed up the politics and plausibility of Firefly even more badly in the cinema.

I'll buy that there are story reasons to justify all of it - and I'm sure there are - but as you say, that doesn't make the problem any less not there.

whether he doesn't realise it and thinks this is an ideal, as a result of the rather juvenile "never trust anyone who looks over thirty or organisations of more than four people" attitudes that crept into late Buffy and Angel.

I actually realized on a recent reviewing of the Nightmare on Elm Street series that this philosophy has been part of Buffy from the beginning - the Sunnydale amnesia is essentially the same atttitude of all the aduts in Freddy Krueger's universe, of ignore it and insist that it doesn't exist, and it'll go away. That adults are evil, or well-meaning but clownish, and the kids are the only ones who know what's what, is a horror-movie standard.

What worries me most about this current plotline, actually, even more than the feminist issues (which I don't actually hold out a lot of faith for being corrected) is that I can also easily see this possiblity of a cringe-worthy direction of political metaphor, considering that we have an evil general trying to take down "that bitch," and the Slayer "troops" seem already primed for being caught in a larger leadership crossfire. And considering how the political metaphors panned out in S7 - one overwhelming suicide strike equals mission accomplished!! - I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to see that one.

this philosophy has been part of Buffy from the beginning - the Sunnydale amnesia is essentially the same atttitude of all the aduts in Freddy Krueger's universe, of ignore it and insist that it doesn't exist, and it'll go away. That adults are evil, or well-meaning but clownish, and the kids are the only ones who know what's what, is a horror-movie standard

At the time of S4/5 of Buffy I tended to believe that the uselessness of adults was another part of the reification of adolescent fears and preoccupations in the high school part of the series, and that it would change as the characters got older. But much the same attitudes appear in the final eps of AtS5 where over half the regulars are over one hundred.

I can also easily see this possiblity of a cringe-worthy direction of political metaphor, considering that we have an evil general trying to take down "that bitch," and the Slayer "troops" seem already primed for being caught in a larger leadership crossfire. And considering how the political metaphors panned out in S7 - one overwhelming suicide strike equals mission accomplished!! - I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to see that one

Oh yeah, I share your worry.

At the time of S4/5 of Buffy I tended to believe that the uselessness of adults was another part of the reification of adolescent fears and preoccupations in the high school part of the series, and that it would change as the characters got older. But much the same attitudes appear in the final eps of AtS5 where over half the regulars are over one hundred.

Yeah, I think the don't-trust-anyone-over-30 and don't-trust-corporations ended up shading into general-purpose paranoia in both series by the end.

Although that does make me wonder why BtVS never really exploited this to the full in The First storyline, in S7 - possibly because the Jasmine arc was already working the paranoia card in AtS, but the idea of the whole town turning against its defenders under the influence of The First seems like such a gimme. And we only got that little taste of it with the cops who went after Faith...

I think how Willow is portrayed will be the determining factor for me at wear Joss is with the comics. If she turns up as Miss Perfect and cleanses all problems with a wink, it'll be the end of the comics for me, even as a passing interest.

I hadn't thought about Drac, but it fits as he's the only character I can think of that'd say 'my love' in the Buffyverse. Not sure if that means anything, though, 'cause IMO, Buffy'd never say 'Oh, balls' either. Spoilers indicate a different possibility, though.

*where

Edit feature, LJ, stat!

I had the same thought about Buffy saying "Oh, balls," which is really a Spike line. Although Joss hasn't exactly been Mr. Consistency on the voices for awhile now - I remember thinking that his X-Men comic tended to lash around using Spike-voice for Emma and/or Wolverine at the same time as he was writing lines for Spike that sounded like Wolverine ("not this girl, not this day"). So I'm not sure how much I should assign to what any character sounds like... which is another reason for me to feel uneasy about this rendition of the 'verse.

As far as I understand, the next arc will be about Faith, and then subsequent arcs with feature other various characters. So if you want every issue to center around Buffy, you might not want to pick up all of those.

That's the thing, though - I'm not just interested in Buffy. This World of Slayers concept strikes me as something you could really run with, but from what I've seen so far, I'm really getting the feeling that Joss isn't interested in any of those girls. I know most people would probably say "good!", because the Potentials in S7 were hardly hugely interesting characters, but... that's kind of my point. Shouldn't they all be potential Buffies? Why aren't they more interesting?

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Birthdays! and Links and Season 8 Comic Stuff

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