Morning, Glorious Morning

Ah, comics. Love 'em. I guess I should say, "love good comics," but I actually love a lot of bad ones too, so screw that. Comics are audacious. They're ids on paper. They are dramatic and funny and in-your-face. There's a lot to love. While you'll never see a politician who'd have the courage to stand on a stage and outline his mental model of the universe for you, comic writers come right out and come up with an answer to everything - good and evil, gods and devils, heaven and hell, what happens after you die, what you'll find if you travel to the ends of the universe, the origins of life... they've done it all, often in terms that make the Greek myths look sane. Only in comics can you find the personification of Death as a guy on skis. (For real - Jack Kirby's "Black Racer.")

That's not to say that there isn't a lot of pretentious crapola, but that's true of any artistic endeavour. Don't get me started on a lot of modern art. Painters! Abstract works only about 10 percent of the time, and most of those times have to do with couch coordination. Content, people, content! Show me something I can at least try to ponder the meaning of!

Anyway, what brought this on is my latest comic store aquisition - Annual #4 of Hate, a comic I love by Peter Bagge. Weird, hilarious, and true-to-life. Read it, love it, hate it. Become endeared by his absolutely insane, kinda disgusting artwork. Be entertained by his tales of regulars schlubs like you and me out in the crazy day-to-day world. Become inflamed and amused by his political rantings! Feel inspired and somehow rejuvinated by his rundown of the latest bubblegum teen rock bands actually worth downloading for free, or spending actual $$$ to get Euro imports of on eBay. Go, Pete, Go! I know you have a kid now, but pleeeeease put out more comics, not just one new Hate annual per year. I miss your old comic Neat Stuff! I have all the issues! *Sob* Come back to us...!

More Comics Fun

Also picked up the Tales of the Vampires comic, which is probably going to be one of the few last Buffy related comics projects to happen now that I understand that the monthly series are ending. Not because the Buffy and Angel comics aren't popular, but because single-issue comics are a hopelessly dying breed these days, and I can see why - even with the glossy paper publishers use these days, three bucks for about 30 pages isn't the world's hottest value. It was that simple financial fact that turned me from someone who used to buy comics every week into someone how picks up the occasional issue of something I'm interested in. Yeah, I know... digression.

Anyway, Tales of the Vampires. I'd grabbed the earlier Tales of the Slayers series, which had been good fun - particularly good stories included the Slayer in Nazi Germany and the cross-dressing Slayer - but this I found... well, a little disappointing. For one thing, it's not tales of random vampires (there is a Whedon short story called "Stacy" at the end that's kind of neat - a girl who sees becoming a vampire in terms of entering the world of magic and Lord of the Rings style epics... a fair take, I'd say, kinda fairytale horrific), but the rest of the book is a dramatization of whatever-happened-with-that-riot-in-Prague with Drusilla and Spike. This wasn't really as good as it could have been. For starters, Pat Lee could have knocked himself out a little more on the artwork for the location than the slightly redrawn photocopies trick - I've been to Prague, and that place is atmosphere central. A few more background details would have gone a long way. (For example, the fight on the bridge is a nice touch, although if we're supposed to imply the famous Charles Bridge for this scene, Lee forgot to include the statues.) And while Drusilla being tortured with traditional medieval devices is pretty creepy, I'd always pictured more of the insane mob scene, something that'd leave her turned about inside-out. She doesn't look all that messed-up at the end of this one. Not sure I'm convinced that these injuries would have really lasting effects.

Drew Goddard's depiction of Spike in this story is interesting for being so unapologetically heroic. The guy is a friggin' Sir Lancelot here, and y'know, this is also the Spike that viewers originally fell in love with, way back when - the guy who'll do anything for his girl, ala "Becoming Part 2." Dru's own point of view comes in a number of romantic thoughts such as "my poet... my love... my boy." Sweet Sid and Nancy, it's really rather touching.

So mixed vote: art could have been more evocative, story could have gone an extra mile or two (a story set in Eastern Europe with no witches or gypsy portents or anything?), but the emotional stuff handed me a pleasant fuzzy. Totleben could have knocked himself out a bit more on the cover, though..

The Problem With Fic Recs

Ah, fanfiction. I actually read a lot of BtVS fanfic (my history in short: watched the show since S2, discovered fic in S5). It's been a marvelous sort of therapy for a lot of my issues regarding the show. I read a lot of different genres: I love the canonical stuff that seriously explores what we saw onscreen; I love the angsty character studies; I love the fluffy relationship fics where everyone's happy. I've even come to like some of those "everybody's human" alternative universe fics which I used to shy away from - essentially, the wonderful thing about fic is that it lets you explore other options with the characters that go the next step beyond. And for BtVS, that's become kinda necessary for me. I love the characters... or did at one time, and fic lets me enjoy them again. Even Buffy. I love a good fic that makes me like her again, that finds something either in that last, sad image of an unbaked cookie that we were left with and finds something meaningful in it (and I've seen plenty of good ones in this vein, most quite angsty), or that backs up the character to an earlier point in the series and takes her forward from a different set of choices. I love it all.

So here's the problem: I've been working on a list of recommendations for the Just Stake Me! site, but as anyone who's read through just a little of this journal can tell, I'm simply not capable of putting up something simple like "here's a good story: (link)" - I've got to run off at the mouth about it in detail, which quickly turns the task of making list into a Herculean effort. At this rate, by the time I get the thing finished, a lot of the sites I'd like to recommend will probably have gone away.

Instead then, I'm going to go for a more organic approach:

Today's Rec: Fiction by Amerella

I can't remember how I ran across this author. But the site's on my lengthy bookmark list, so I checked back to see why. Oh. Now I remember.

There are only three stories on this site. Every one of them made me cry oozing tears of heartfelt, gorgeous angst. These are lovely character studies, absolutely beautiful. I sometimes try to write stories like this, but I'm no good at it - Amerella is good. Poetic, amazing, ethereal, sad.

Tomorrow's recs will be happy ones.

On a fairly unrelated note, Queen of the Damned is a much underrated movie.