#mostly because most of the people in it haven't read a single comic book and

[haveyoureadthiscomic-poll]

Okay it is Infinity Inc. propaganda time it is time to show off the niche kiddos

Infinity Inc. propoganda under the cut

The day is Christmas Eve, 1983, and the JSA are having their annual Christmas Eve meeting, and Hawkman (blissfully unaware that his family is about to come to him) suggests adjourning the meeting so that all of them can get back to their families, and Green Lantern (blissfully unaware that fate is about to kick him in the balls... TWICE.) retorts that he doesn't have a family, this is kind of dickish of Alan but like... it's ALAN lol. Suddenly, the old men are being tormented by waves of stupid children, all demanding to be allowed to join the team... and also one of their villains children doesn't actually ask to join the team but he does... for some reason go "when I am asking for help from my father's enemies, the thing to do is to illusion myself to look like my father, and then tear a hole in their wall, wait, why are they trying to arrest me?! RUDE!!! I am sulking now!"

Thank you for your input Henry.

Anyway, since the old men respond... somewhat reasonably to whatever the fuck that was, their kids decide to band together and make their own superhero team, where they get PAID! (less than minimum wage).

Infinity Inc. is an interesting team series that I mostly enjoy because of the characters, a lot of the time in team books the characters all feel the same, and are all at each other's throats constantly, Infinity Inc. presents the reader with characters who all have very defined personalities, even if most of them do share the character trait of "stupid", and by the end of the series you feel like you genuinely love all of the characters and want to spend more time with them.

DC notably decided that all Infinity Inc. characters should spend the next decade dying or going evil btw.

BUT THEN THEY GET BETTER. The Infinitors are kind of notable in that there are entire arcs of JSA 1999 where the old men try to rescue their kids, and all of them end up being considered JSA kids, including Hank who is being chased around the planet by Jay Garrick holding adoption papers (uncertain if this is continuing now that Jay has Judy tbh I do not trust Geoff Johns)

(context, Wildcat hits Hank with the 'kid of a supervillain' stuff well after he thought the JSA was fine with his general existance, my favorite scene because all of the Infinitors are instantly protective, and all of them give vibes of being really close, even if DC refuses to allow a full team reunion)

Honestly in my years of getting people to read Infinity Inc. it's notable that every single time someone has come out with a different fave, and I think it's a testament to the characters being really good, ESPECIALLY HECTOR AND LYTA who are JSA characters and NOT Vertigo characters and Vertigo shouldn't be allowed to stop them appearing in JSA comics.

Also the boys do this in hallways for unknown reasons

What was meant by this?:

Read Infinity Inc. today so you too can be convinced that Hank King should be the next character DC makes gay, unless they decide to do Norda first...

Tbh if I'm being honest they should probably just pull a Young Avengers and make every Infinitor gay.

#infinity inc #jsa #justice society #justice society of america #dcu #dc comics #poll

[comicaurora]

Question, from one aspiring writer to another: how do you manage to maintain the drive to keep writing and how do you not lose interest in what you've created before it's done? Asking because I need advice.

Tricky question. I don't think it has a single answer.

For me personally, there are a few things that buoy up my enthusiasm:

Rabbit Holes - random deep-dives into topics I find incredibly interesting. Because I have so many outlets for my rants about highly specific cool things, I don't need to stifle any random hyperfixations because almost all of them can be turned into scripts or worldbuilding concepts. If I feel the enthusiasm strike, I chase it down as far as I can and take as many notes as possible along the way. However, these things work like lightning strikes and I can't just get randomly super interested in any one thing. Almost all of my longform videos start out as these.

Comedic Reframing - the bread and butter of the channel and the lifehack that let my poor brain actually focus on extremely long and boring books through college. It's easier for me to retain information and enthusiasm if I can find humor in what I'm dealing with on a smaller scale. When working on illustrating videos, for instance, the way I avoid burning out on individual frames is by making sure they have witty dialogue or fun character moments, because I genuinely enjoy drawing those a lot more than just "character moves into position" or "scene change" shots. Same goes for the comic - the more dynamic or interesting the pose, the more interesting the panel is to draw and the easier it is for me to stay jazzed.

Audience Feedback - I feel like this part is simultaneously understated and overstated in different ways. Creating art solely for the accolades it might garner is seen as generally both gauche and inefficient - it'll turn into an existentially draining losing battle like all pursuit of fame for fame's sake does - but any writer or artist will tell you that people losing their minds over their art is the number one way to guarantee they want to make more art. When drawing the comic, even when I'm lower energy, I'll often think to myself "oh man, they're gonna be yelling about this panel" and that'll help give me a boost. Early on in the comic I read through the discord discussions almost every day, but now I'm mostly sustained just from people yelling in my askbox.

Letting The Characters Run Wild - I've mentioned this elsewhere, but one of the most fun parts of writing for me is when the characters kinda tap me on the shoulder and say "hey boss, I really wanna do this". Their character-moment is almost always spicier, more complicated and more interesting than whatever plot-serving guideline it's replacing. Making the characters act as automatons that solely move the plot forward is less interesting for me as a writer than turning them loose and seeing the havoc they cause. Before I ever put pen to paper for this story, half my fun would just be playing out extremely fraught conversations and encounters between characters - no script, no plan, just "here's the premise and GO." Lots of stories start out as daydreams, and daydreams are like the purest form of energizing creation, existing only for the joy of the creator and thus flowing almost effortlessly; I think it's important to retain the heart of that when the daydreams start being set down on paper. If it's not a little self-indulgent it's not gonna be too much fun, and sometimes all it takes is letting the characters do the wild thing with consequences you haven't fully worked out yet.

In my experience, the thing I enjoy most as a creator is solving puzzles. I have more fun writing my story when I only mostly know where it's going, and I have to work out the most interesting consequences to my characters' unexpected actions. I have more fun drawing out a joke if the punchline didn't even occur to me before I started the frame, because the idea is fresh and fun and hasn't gone stale from sitting in my head too long. And my enthusiasm for my older work is reinvigorated when I see how other people respond to it, because it lets me almost see my own work through fresh eyes, which is a rare treat for any creator.

And when I get really worn down, I treat that like a sign that something needs readjusting. I don't force it when I'm worn out or can't bear to look at my tablet - I step back, take a break, take a walk, indulge in Floor Time, watch a movie, buy a coffee, do something that isn't trying to floor the accelerator when I'm stuck in a creative snowdrift. Sometimes that means putting a project down for months. Sometimes that means realizing I wouldn't actually be able to make a project happen because it'd be draining my will to live the whole time.

I sometimes use the metaphor that a creator's mind is like a garden. Its works need to be cultivated, but sometimes they also need to be left alone, or maybe the soil needs to be actively left fallow for a while. It may look like the project isn't doing anything, when in actuality it's spreading its roots and developing a much more solid foundation where you can't see it. Maybe two concepts cross-pollinate in an unexpected way and you get a new third thing to cultivate. But the most important part of this metaphor is that the well-being of every individual thing growing in the garden is heavily dependent on the heart of the garden overall. If you aren't doing okay, your art isn't going to be okay either. If it's feeling like a fruitless and nothing is growing, you might just need rain. Or nitrogen-fixers.

#asks #art stuff #writing stuff

[sineala]

I’m excited for Jed MacKay’s Avengers and I love the way he writes Tony 🥰. And while I am a little bummed Steve isn’t on THIS team, I love that Captain America Sam is now back on a team with Tony

What are some of you favourite Sam and Tony moments (shippy or otherwise)? I haven’t read all of All New All Different but I liked what I have read of Sam and Tony in that run

And what are some of you favourite Jed MacKay comics? You mentioned you liked his Strange work.

I'm always a little sad when Steve and Tony aren't on a team together, and I am even more sad now that it's Jed MacKay on Avengers just like we all wanted... but we don't get Steve & Tony. I am holding out hope that maybe Steve will join them.

I do really like Sam in team books -- I feel like he hasn't actually been showcased all that well in his own Cap solo books, sadly -- and I feel like ANAD Avengers was a run with a lot of potential that unfortunately ran into a bunch of line-wide events and didn't really get a time to develop as a team, but I loved the "Sam and Tony mentoring a bunch of teenagers" angle because I think that's a role we haven't gotten to see them in all that much.

If you want to see Sam & Tony working together and you want a little more feeling than ANAD Avengers has, what you really want is Brubaker-era Captain America, especially after Steve's death. Sam and Tony, like Tony and Bucky, kind of triangulate around Steve, their shared interest.

I have added some panels below.

You can see this even in ANAD, where from the very first issue, they're just talking about Steve:

I think both of those exchanges are Tony just spontaneously bringing up Steve, actually. He and Steve just do this to other people about each other. (My favorite moment is that one SWORD issue where they're talking about colonizing Mars and no one has said anything about Tony and then Steve just launches into an impromptu speech about how amazing Tony is.)

But, anyway, yeah, Cap comics after Steve's death are I think where it's at for Sam & Tony. They're two of Steve's pallbearers in Fallen Son #5:

In that issue, Sam is also the one who steps up and actually gives a eulogy when Tony just can't keep it together long enough to say anything.

But what you actually want to read is Brubaker Cap, because Sam and Tony are working together and dealing with the loss of Steve. Here's Tony explaining that Sharon killed Steve, to Sam, in Cap v5 #31:

I would recommend it over ANAD if you're looking for emotional character moments involving the two of them -- as far as I can remember, when they both appear in the main Avengers line together over the years, they mostly tend to just focus on work.

As for Jed MacKay, I loved his IM & Avengers annuals and the Iron Cat mini, but I have really, really loved his Strange run so far; it is easily my favorite run in the modern revamp of Strange. I liked the Aaron, Cates, and Waid runs decently well (and my opinion ascends in that order). I own most of them in trade; I hadn't been buying the single issues. And then MacKay came on the book and I thought, "Okay, well, Death of Doctor Strange. That doesn't sound like something I want to read. Definitely not gonna subscribe to that one." Then I actually read it and I realized it was better than all three of those runs and I immediately subscribed to it. So he's got me actually buying Strange in floppies, FWIW.

The reason his Strange run is so good for me is also why his characterization of Tony is so good for me -- somehow what he writes is exactly what I want. He's clearly read canon and is pulling all these little moments and obscure details and getting all the feelings and the character dynamics right. Like, you know how that Avengers Annual is just an entire annual of Steve and Tony hanging out and fighting villains together and even the villain knows how important they are to each other because they make them fight versions of each other? If you were like "I want an issue that's really about Steve and Tony" it is just... exactly what you want. His Strange run is like that for Strange & Clea.

I was going to explain exactly what I liked about his Strange but that's a whole other post and I realized after taking a dozen screencaps that you didn't actually ask me to summarize it, so I won't unless you actually want me to. The short answer is that I am a massive Strange/Clea shipper -- and I was fairly bitter about the way Waid left them in his run -- and apparently so is Jed MacKay because he has devoted his entire run so far to getting them back together, in an extremely romantic way. They finally accept what they mean to each other, and then Strange dies, Clea becomes Sorcerer Supreme, and she is going to move heaven and earth to get him back. Featuring massive amounts of identity porn, the angsty inability to touch each other, and the sexy sexy life/death metaphors that we all wish Hickman's Avengers run had given to Steve/Tony but hey here they are. This is what the entire Strange run is about. It is solely "Clea's gonna get her husband back and set you on fire if you get in her way." That is the plot.

Like, it is somehow exactly perfectly the thing I want even though somehow I did not know until I read it that it was exactly that thing.

#replies #visitant-dispatch

[irregularjohnnywiggins]

Please make that post

In reference to this post here and the larger point from this post.

So, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has two big fundamental problems in its premise, added onto by a whole load of sub-problems like 'Alan Moore has not met a woman character he can't insert a sexual assault storyline into yet', 'We're in that age where comics have to be juvenile to prove they're adult' and 'Alan Moore is the Grumpy Old Man Eternal'. These two problems are endemic of all fiction on the scale that League is operating on, and why I say it may be unintentionally the greatest critique of Event Comics in the world. These problems are

You cannot have experienced every work of fiction you are playing with (particularly in League's case: Alan Moore has not read every book and watched every movie in the entire world). Subsequently:

You will inevitably end up drawing mostly on what you are familiar with and let other things fall by the wayside.

This is endemic to Event Comics - even with a Shared Universe as rigorously pruned as DC or Marvel, your average comic book writer cannot have read every single comic featuring every single character in that universe, which inevitably means you are going to be able to tell which ones they have read - if you're lucky the ones they haven't read get bit parts, if you're unlucky you get Wonder Woman in Infinite Crisis. It's not even explicitly a problem, it's just a fact of event comics that we've all had to accept.

When it comes to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, this flaw gets amplified - which makes sense, since this flaw is proportional to the size of the source texts you are drawing from* and Alan Moore is drawing from all of fiction. As a precursor because we need to get this enforced more, the comics are extremely Anglocentric. Like, look at The New Traveller's Almanac from the back of Volume 2, and note how often a story actually from Africa, Asia or even Europe and America is mentioned, versus a story from Britain about those places. Hell, The Journey to the West, one of the most influential pieces of literature in the world, gets all of three references in this series.

It's a huge problem, and honestly makes me want more than ever a series like League by people from Africa and Asia - I'd be horribly confused reading it, but that'd be great, it'd expand my horizons all the more.

But that's not the gripe I want to bring up today. No, even after all that complaining about the Anglocentrism of League, I want to be a little more Anglocentric myself today. If you're not down for what is inevitably almost 1000 words of petty fanboy whining, please leave now, hope you enjoyed the actual salient criticism! Sorry 'bout that, but it's time: let's discuss Will Stanton at Hogwarts.

Bit of background for people who need it: in Volume 3 of League, the protagonists are trying to stop the Antichrist from ending the world. They eventually follow his tracks to a school in Scotland, where he was groomed to be the Antichrist and where he has just killed a host of people in a castle that is said to have once been able to move. The entire thing is a giant subtweet to Harry Potter for being unoriginal and, y'know, I'm not really going to defend that? I don't engage in criticism of Harry Potter's unoriginality myself, because it doesn't bother me too much and I genuinely feel that it takes away from the many more serious issues with the series, but it's still a fair cop and lord knows I love to point out the ripoffs whenever some TERFy piece of shit tries to insist that Rowling is some visionary writer that single-handedly invented the concept of female authors. If all Century was saying was that Harry Potter kind of sucks, I'd honestly probably add it on to things like Pratchett and Le Guin pointing out the flaws way before most people caught on. But there's one issue I take, and it's this:

The point Moore seems to be making, at least from what I can tell and what the common critical consensus is, is that Century is a three-issue rant about the commodification of magic and occult mystery, something the self-professed worshiper of an ancient snake god seems to take umbrage with. Harry Potter doesn't just suck because it's unoriginal, it and all British Wizard Children Fantasy of the incredibly nebulous time of basically everything post-1950s suck because they took away the magic and mystery from... well, magic.

And, y'know, I may not believe in actual magic myself, but I'm not going to say Moore is wrong to believe that. The message itself is fine. The problem is... well, 1. Alan Moore has not read every story in the world and consequently 2. He inevitably ends up drawing from what he's familiar with, and the things he hasn't read get used as props. And, my friends, he has not read The Dark Is Rising, which still remains one of my favorite books ever written. This is not a combination that results in a happy David.

Like, if Alan Moore is angry about the lack of mystery and intrigue in 'modern' fantasy? Here's a scene from the chapter of The Dark Is Rising where Will learns everything he needs to know as an ageless Old One:

He might read no more than one line — I have journeyed as an eagle — and he was soaring suddenly aloft as if winged, learning through feeling, feeling the way of resting on the wind and tilting round the rising columns of air, of sweeping and soaring, of looking down at patchwork-green hills capped with dark trees, and a winding, glinting river between. And he knew as he flew that the eagle was one of the only five birds who could see the Dark, and instantly he knew the other four, and in turn he was each of them. . . .

He read: . . . you come to the place where is the oldest creature that is in this world, and he that has fared furthest afield, the Eagle of Gwernabwy . . . and Will was up on a bare crag of rock above the world, resting without fear on a grey-black glittering shelf of granite, and his right side leaned against a soft, gold-feathered leg and a folded wing, and his hand rested beside a cruel steel-hard hooked claw, while in his ear a harsh voice whispered the words that would control wind and storm, sky and air, cloud and rain, and snow and hail — and everything in the sky save the sun and the moon, the planets and the stars.

How's that for mystery, Al? How's that for not trivializing magic? Maybe, if you hadn't very clearly picked Will's name out of a list of children's fantasy from the 1950s onwards, which is what I have to assume you did because the amount of references at Not-Hogwarts is so broad that you can't purely be criticizing Harry Potter and it's derivatives, Dark Is Rising came out in 1973 for god's sake, you wouldn't end up saying that a series that states outright in the fifth book that a key factor of magic is accepting that there are some things you will never know is less mystical and magical than Mary Fucking Poppins, no offense to Mary.

Now, is this petty fanboy complaining about a character from a series I like not being treated 100% how I want him? ...Yeah, pretty much, because if Moore hadn't included Will I wouldn't be as annoyed at his treatment of him. But that's another problem with League: Alan Moore uses the world of League to make broad sweeping statements: "Fiction from the 1800s was better", "Children's Fantasy trivializes magic", "Superheroes all suck unless they're obscure enough that I know them and no-one else", statements that cannot possibly hold up to scrutiny because he's not read everything in the world, and hell he's not even read most of the things he complains about because he's convinced himself he knows it all already. It's the problem with everything he uses, he warps it to fit his own worldview and leaves the people who love those stories, who read League entirely because it features those characters, in the lurch. He's reinvented the Event Comic, and it may be a parody but I'm not sure it is, and that's depressing.

*This, incidentally, is why I think Kim Newman's attempts at this concept work better than League - for most of his stories that I've read, Newman is pulling from genres specific enough to be conceivable but expansive enough to fill a supporting cast - e.g. vampire and associated Gothic literature of the 1800s for Anno Dracula or femme fatales throughout the 1800s for Angels of Music.

#league of extraordinary gentlemen #lxg #the dark is rising #wow this got wordy #and inevitably only two people are going to care about the second half #but some rants I just go on for me y'know? #incidentally those two flaws with Shared Universes are why I'm really nervous to include Africa and Asia as actual places in #The Matter of Britain #like I reaaaally don't want to screw that up

[droids-in-disguise]

I just finished watching The Sandman for the first time, and as a comic book enjoyer, it scratched a very particular itch for me.

I haven't read the Sandman comics specifically but I do read a lot of comics, generally, and one thing I loved is how the show maintained the structure and flow of reading a comic book series. Despite watching a lot of comic-to-screen adaptations I've never really seen one done like this before, or at least none so obviously as Sandman.

When you read comics, you start to notice that most series have multiple story-arcs of varying lengths, they sometimes move concurrently, sometimes not. Sometimes arcs will span the entire length of the series. Sometimes they will end just before a new head writer joins the team. Sometimes arcs will crossover between two or more different comic titles, and you can stick with just one title to get an ok story or make sure you hunt down all the issues to get the complete one. Sometimes story-arcs will last a handful of issues acting as a mini story within the story. Sometimes an arc will be a single issue one-shot, or a one-shot might have multiple tiny arcs, and so on.

Morpheus hunting for his lost ruby, helm, and sand is one story-arc (this is random but it's actually somewhat similar to the arc in the current Loki comics where three pieces of the naglfar ship have been stolen and used by those who do not understand their consequences and Loki must hunt them down). You could watch just the first 5 episodes of The Sandman and have a relatively satisfying and mostly complete story, same with episodes 7-10 which encompass the Vortex arc. Even while these entirely separate arcs are happening, the Corinthian's story is underpinning all of them.

Then you have episodes 6 and 11 which effectively function as self-contained one-shots. Episode 6 is that issue that gives you a breather between the more complex story-arcs, gives the writers a chance to breathe and do a bit of a character study. Morpheus spending a day with Death and Hob's story certainly fit within the themes of the show and flesh out what we know about the show's world and characters, but they don't really have much to do with moving the plot along for either the hunting for lost items or Vortex arcs. Episode 11 feels like the special issue where guest artists and writers are invited to create their own anthology of stories within the universe we know (reminds me of DC's Pride one-shots, or Marvel's Voices anthology series), especially with the episode's double title and the fact that the first part of the episode is animated. "Dream of a Thousand Cats" answers the question: what about the dreams of animals? "Calliope" is an entirely self-contained story of a muse, trapped and abused by men for their own selfish gain. You wouldn't even necessarily know it was set in the Sandman universe except for the fact that Morpheus shows up towards the end.

When it comes to characters there's a massive cast, and different characters show up at varying levels of consistency, with Morpheus being the only one who ties everything together. The others who appear with the most frequency are the ones close to Morpheus like Lucienne and Matthew. You have characters that only show up for one arc, such as Ethel and John, or Rose and Jed. You have a character like Unity who we briefly meet in the first arc but who doesn't really come into play until the Vortex. You have episode 5, "24/7" where 75% of the episode is carried by a group of people in a diner that we've never seen before and almost certainly will never see again. Comic books are not limited by how many characters they have because all an artist has to do is draw them, they don't have to hire new actors each time. Compare that to most shows where almost everything revolves around a small group of consistent characters.

Perhaps I'm stating the obvious with all of this, but I just really fell in love with the way this show was structured and I feel like even if no one told me it was based on a comic series I still would've been able to figure it out.

#the sandman

[waspsinyouryard]

I’m curious how everyone’s year was so please tell me what you favourite ----- from this year was! Answer as many or as few as you want! (Feel free to send this to other people and change it if you want)

Favourite Movie/Show you watched: 

Favourite Album you listened to:

Favourite thing you learned: 

Favourite book/comic: 

Favourite project you completed: 

Best impulse purchase?

Funniest joke you heard?

Strangest building you went in?

New food you discovered?

Most memorable conversation?

Prettiest sunset?

Favourite new outfit?

What are you proud of this year?

Favourite Memory from this year: 

Anything you would change? 

Anything you’re looking forwards to in the new year?

~Gumi

I'm going to try and answer all of these but I can already tell that some of these are going to be difficult:

1. Favorite movie/show

I don't really watch movies out of my own volition and I'm like the one Tumblr user who doesn't watch TV shows (and my memory is bad, so I could also be forgetting something) so my options are very limited:

The FNAF movie (which was laughably terrible)

Stranger than Fiction (a 2006 movie that was just. not good. I didn't like it.)

Rio 2 (a kid sitting next to me for a substantial amount of time was watching it and I could hear the audio)

Out of those options I'd probably have to say the FNAF movie was my favorite because it was bad in a funny way and also recency bias.

2. Favorite Album

My music consumption is almost exclusively video game soundtracks and I haven't really found any games to love the soundtrack of recently anyways so

3. Favorite thing I've learned

I can't think of any one piece of knowledge that stands out as my favorite. I'm just happy to know things tbh

4. Favorite Book/Comic

I read quite a few books (mostly the Warriors series, near the beginning of the year) but my favorite probably still has to be Love and Limerence by Dorothy Tennov. I reread it this year so it counts.

5. Favorite project I completed

Probably this ridiculous 14k word Wings of Fire fanfiction where the world ends tbh. It's kinda very rough, but I had a blast making it.

6. Best impulse purchase

A greenish-blue Hawaiian shirt

7. Funniest joke

Unironically this

Leave the poor woman alone :(

8. Strangest building

Probably the church I took those photos in tbh. I get that it's not that strange overall but it was for me

9. Best new food

I can't think of any new food, but I did discover that French fries and (to an admittedly lesser degree) saltine crackers make surprisingly good additions to toppings and/or fillings.

10. Most memorable conversation

This one's memorable in a bad way.

Essentially, it was a conversation between myself and a friend about a Minecraft server we were on where said friend told me that I managed to piss off every single other member of the server. Of course I was a bit distraught about this, and I decided that I just wouldn't play on it anymore. Before that I was basically the most active member by far.

The reason I remember it so well is because I'm still so baffled about why what I did (kill the Ender Dragon on the first day of a new world (after rules regarding doing so were specifically abolished) and kill the Wither like a week later) enraged these people so much that they called for my friend to ban me (he didn't, btw).

11. Prettiest sunset

All of them. Unless I'm trying to go west and the sun is shining in my eyes.

12. Favorite new outfit

The Hawaiian shirt I mentioned previously.

13. Things I'm proud of

Here's a list, not in any sort of order:

Writing that fanfic I mentioned earlier

Figuring out Tumblr API stuff so I could improve @postsofbabel. And I guess it in general.

My progress on a new fanfic set in the Warriors world, where being sold to 1D is a major plot point.

Surviving, tbh

14. Favorite memory

uh

15. Anything I would change

I would change a lot about 2023, but I simply do not think I would have the ability enact a lot of these changes if I could go back through this year again.

16. Anything I'm looking forward to

World of Goo 2. Probably more that I can't think of at the moment but World of Goo is excellent

#ask

[trickster-whim]

So, my sister and I had kind of an amazing trip to Goodwill!!

(Kind of long, so I'm gonna put it under a readmore. Also nothing at all explicit, but slightly adult for doujinshi and body pillow covers)

I'm going to go out of order but in the order I took pictures, so first up are these two Dungeon Tiles Master Set boxes! They're really cool, especially since we've been playing dungeons and dragons more lately. Also there were some people's printouts of dnd books, which is adorable. The only thing is that the sets were kinda mixed up, and they were the most expensive single items we got ($6.49, I think?), so we left one behind at the store and who knows what was in that one??

But I definitely want to try to use these sometime, and the boxes themselves are really cute, so ✅

The thing that drew us in and convinced us pretty quickly this was going to be a wild trip, though, was a stack of Japanese novels and doujinshi! This was the same goodwill that I once found a gay space furry retelling of Beauty and the Beast (which turned out to be v good, btw), so there's precedent for some choice smut, but I've never found doujinshi before!

Mostly it's things I'm not super familiar with, and it all appears to be in Japanese, so we can't completely read it (although my sister's kinda learning it in her free time), but it's still awesome.

The non-comic books were these three Gankutsuou novels. Of course I've never seen it, but I did read Count of Monte Cristo in high school! (I remember reading it during my welding class lmao. And I had the teacher who tested us when we got to school over minutia that wasn't in the abridged versions, so yes I read the whole book.)

Can't read it, still cool.

The doujinshi/fanbooks I'm having a harder time finding info about, despite the fact that most of them list an author/illustrator and date. Again, they're in Japanese, but these have (more) pictures 😎. And they're quite nice pictures too lmao.

Three of the books are fanbooks from Magi (I'm not sure if that's Magi the Labyrinth of Magic, but I've been reading that, so I guess I'll see within ~300 chapters), two are from Tiger and Bunny (which I wanted to watch but just haven't gotten around to it), and one from Heat Guy J (which I've never heard of, but it looks kind of great, but it's not available for streaming right now).

Again, I haven't seen any of the anime these are from, and they're in Japanese, so I've been using an online translator to translate (and the pictures help ngl), but I fucking love them. Some aren't 100% my style (I was literally talking the day before about how many fetish-y amputee mods there are for Fallout, and one book is about a character with amputated limbs in a way I'm not sure isn't fetish-y, but it's not, like, offensive I don't think), but I'm a big fan of smut idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (Also! I forgot to add that the art is very good. I'm going to keep looking up the artists to see if they've done anything else I might also like :p )

(I do have to say: these books are mostly censored [that is, no explicit shots of genitals without censor bars], but they are very adult, and they were just sitting out there for anyone to stumble on. Like when I found a Torchwood book in the kids section of Bookmans. Idk.)

Anyway! The next stuff is not smutty (sadly): Daisuki Magazine!

I hadn't heard of this magazine, but it's a mid-2000s German-language manga mag, so almost exactly a one-to-one match for my interests lol. My German is rusty, and some of the words are specific, so it's slow going reading it, but look! Fruits Basket! Which we called Frubba when we were kids because we had a million inside jokes!

(I also went back later and got Juni 2007. Also heatstroke because it is hot as all hell here.)

And lastly was another impulse purchase but also amazing: a Nightwing body pillow cover by soltian!!

Sorry for the terrible shot lmao. I wanted to put it on my pillowcase-less pillow immediately, so I had to wash it quickly.

I love this art (༎ຶ ෴ ༎ຶ)

I don't follow comics, but I read almost every DC (especially Batman) comic in our city's library system when I was in high school, so yeah. Also I really do like the art; it's very cute.

(Side note, all of soltion's art is cute. They have charms, and the digidestined are absolutely perfect and I love them. They also have the pillowcases in stock right now so, you know, support the artists! I'm really eyeing those keychains honestly!)

A better(?) picture of the pillowcase which also shows off the last thing I got while we were out: new bedclothes!

We stopped at Walmart because my mom had a gift card, and they had a nine-piece sheets and stuff set for $9, and I've been looking for a new blanket and pillowcases, so score! It was full size, and my bed's a twin, so it's very large, but who cares? I get almost all my bedclothes at goodwill, so I'm pleased :p

Anyway back to the goodwill trip. It was expensive, ha. Everything we got cost between $2 and $7, which is amazing but adds up, and I am so, so grateful that goodwill has a 20% off $20+ coupon and also that my sister who has a job bought this lot UwU

So it cost about $37 for a stack of doujinshi, manga mags, light novels, dnd tile sets, and a body pillow cover. So, um. Yeah. My sister and I were freaking out lmao. I don't know if we'll find such a good haul again, but I'm super happy with all this. Now I just need to make room on my packed shelves.

[kaldurcalm]

I've been meaning to do a black girls in webtoons reclist and I'm a little nervous about it because I'm white, but I haven't seen any comparable lists yet so. Here I go.

Note: this is based on the characters.

I haven't checked to see whether the authors are black or not because although that approach is well-meaning and has its own purpose (boosting black women who make comics), it can also lead to gatekeeping and invasive behavior on the part of fans.

The creators on the webtoons platform often use psuedonyms, so I usually don't go looking for more information than they provide.

My focus here is black girls and women who are treated well by the narrative, because I've seen from other posters that those are the kinds of stories that they would like to read.

With that in mind! I'm just going to go with the first one I see on my subscription list:

This is a superhero comic with a black female lead. She's the one who gets the gang together, and she comes from a society that has some interesting eyewear. (It's kind of a cultural thing.)

All of this is explained in the comic as a part of an ongoing plotline, and everyone's powers feel fresh and interesting.

Note: I do actually know that one of the creators is a black man! It's a team of people who seem pretty neat.

This one is probably suitable for most ages, but there's superhero violence and associated trauma sometimes. They get into social injustice as an ongoing theme for the entire comic, and the characters collectively decided to crash at the place of the richest guy on the team.

He is not thrilled about this.

I love this disaster trans girl.

Mal is a fan of a band called the Crawmamas, and her bff accidentally lands her a job as their social media manager. She is, unfortunately, head over heels for the dirty rat man guitarist.

This comic is going to have themes that are considered adult, like drinking and smoking and sexytimes.

Mal's mom doesn't approve of her wrist tattoo, but she's supportive of "her baby girl" and the other characters either don't know or are supportive (so far).

(I can't vouch for how the narrative will handle things in the future, but she's touring with a tits out type of rock band some of the crew members are gay. I'm not worried about the way the story will handle it.

Even if almost every single character is a disaster human. Help them.)

It's the story of Shahrazad! I read The Shadow Spinner when I was a kid, but not the original story, so I've never seen it like this before.

If you're not familiar: the main character is forcibly married to the rule of her kingdom.

Or, well, she volunteers for the forced marriage process so that she can get revenge on him for killing her best friend.

Along the way, she unveils a curse, and sets about trying to unravel it.

There's violence in this story, but I don't think it's super graphic. It's only a feel-good story if you're into clever, booksmart women who learn to fight injustice in their own ways.

(If you don't like the idea of her catching feelings for the caliph, this story might not be for you.)

If I were to narrow this list down to just soft love stories, this comic would be included. (Gonna be honest: I almost didn't read the whole thing because of the art style, but I'm so glad I did.)

Yani is a short, chubby black girl, and Cage is the tallest, biggest guy in highschool.

... unfortunately this means that she's scared of him at first.

The feeling isn't mutual at all: he saw on stage in a school play and immediately became 100% more interested in Shakespeare.

When their teacher sets him up to tutor her (it's not a romantic thing), he's stoked and she finds out that mostly? He's just shy.

This comic talks about sex in an informative way in the later chapters, and Yani's friends help her overcome a phobia that she's embarrassed to tell people about.

Overall, it's really sweet and wholesome. And it's pretty much completed, so no surprises here!

This is one of my favorite comics of all time, I think.

Ray is a college-age lady who's struggling to figure out her career path--as a seer in a world where you can bake magic into food.

She likes to go to her favorite bakery once a week to have a slice of romance. (Not sure if the romance is in the jam, the bread, or both, but it looks really pretty.)

She seems to have a crush on the lady who owns the bakery (who is also a black woman and happens to be a happily married lesbian), and she helps her love interest overcome his fear of (broomstick) flying (which is similar to driving in this universe-- you have to get a license.)

This one should be safe for all ages, I think! It's one of the softest, sweetest comics I've ever read.

So the actual main character in this comic is basically black gay batman in a purple devil suit, but I'm recommending it because it has two women of color as main characters in the first two seasons.

If you want a smooth recap of the entire thing, read the latest update. Here's the short version:

Honoria Crabb is a hard-nosed cop, until she sees that the entire city is corrupt and and the police force isn't what she'd hoped it would be. She's basically tying the story together right now--you might see what I mean if you click the last link.

Theresa Ferrier is a famous detective, the line of Sherlock Holmes. I say this not because of her personality, but because has a best-selling series about her adventures and has a comparable reputation in this universe.

She's also bald, uses a cane, and is married to the love of her life--Margeurite, a famous painter with a rare brain disease. (Margeurite can't see very well, uses a wheelchair, and is usually carrying her beloved bulldog. )

Theresa basically comes out of retirement to help fund her wife's treatment, and by the end of the second season she retreats so that she can devote herself to her care.

It doesn't even feel like the author is sidelining her or anything--she's influenced the other characters a great deal, and she just wants to care for her wife and be happy.

Overall, you'll like this comic if you like detective stories and masked vigilantes. There's violence and blood, and associated trauma.

I love this comic so much, and I'm a person who tries to stay away from zombies as much as possible.

...let me just show you the main cast:

Spoiler: there's healthy polyamory at the end.

...not with all of them. Two of them in this picture are involved, though, and one of them is black.

(The coach is also black. He gets bitten by the first zombie they see, so the girls have to take care of him. They do a decent job of it.)

I'm not sure how much more I can say without spoiling it because I get too excited. Ya got your jock black girl and your soft cute black girl on the same highschool basketball team, though, so that's why it made this list.

This comic is hilarious and it feels like a slice of life in spite of the fact that it's set during a zombie apocalypse. 10/10 would recommend.

(I also highly recommend the author's other work, which is more graphic and uses more colors in its palette, but that one centers a gay couple. There's some great black ladies in it but they're not the focal point, so I'm just going to mention it as an aside.

You can find it by clicking on the comic description and scrolling to the bottom.)

So the main character starts out a bike messenger. The best damn bike messenger in town.

This is how she becomes a bike messenger for the gods.

It's all very dramatic, and the new job comes with a teleporting magic vending machine for helpful bike parts that help her navigate the godly realm.

Her best friend is another black lady, who works with books and is a badass in her own right, and Dare herself is definitely not straight.

This comic is completed and everything ends well! Dare gets a satisfying love life with another woman and the world is no longer ending.

This comic is sweet, so I'm going to include it, but I don't think it's ever going to be finished.

Ola and her family are illegal immigrants. This comic is a slice of life about her trying to navigate highschool without exposing her family.

The overall tone is pretty light, but I'd you have any experience with that then if might make you nervous.

I don't want to pick favorites, but this one's my favorite.

In a world where you can modify your body the same way we can currently mod videogames, our main character notices another girl who takes the subway because she doesn't use any mods at all.

It's because she has a chronic illness, so she uses technology that others consider outdated (that seems futuristic to us) to help her navigate the world.

She's not in pain all the time, but she has to be careful. Certain types of technology in their world can affect her very badly, so she has to avoid them the same way you'd avoid allergens.

The main character changes her look frequently, but she's always shown as black and, towards the end of the comic, she shares a conversation she had with her mother as a child about the importance of her natural features.

This is an interracial relationship, and the love interest is a white hispanic. She has two dads, and the main character has a mom, a dad, and her mom and dad's partner.

...I'm not super clear on their relationship as it is in the comic but the creator confirmed that they're in a polycule.

This is the kind of comic that makes you feel like you light up inside as you read it. It should be safe for most ages, I think the most adult things in it are job opportunities and kissing. (I'm going off memory, here. I'm doin my best.)

The author also has another comic about a college age magic user who bulldozes her way into an apprenticeship because she's determined to not let her magical form of dyslexia get in the way of her life plans.

(She can't read the spell books at all, so makes herself seeing eye familiar out of what looks like a floppy stuffed animal and a ritual.

The ritual itself isn't clear yet.)

The main character isn't black herself, so I'm not including it as its own entry, but her mentor is black. She's a sweet lady with an adopted son, anxiety, and an understanding girlfriend.

This one doesn't have a final ending because the author came up against a pretty heavy duty mental block, but it did end on a series finale and although it's bittersweet, I think it's pretty good.

[caspianxth]

hi em! again sorry abt the delay in asks haha hopefully i'll be able to send them consistently up til christmas though!! only a couple days left!! i read comics for a bit a year or two ago but kind of fell off haha. i read a couple batman stories and enjoyed them well enough, i just got a little distracted after a while and dropped it, do you have any recs? also great taylor lyric choices, she really is the greatest so i understand it's hard to pick!! also i've gotten many friends into her by sheer persistence so it can be done!! just keep being annoying!! some more random qs: what's your favorite color? favorite book? -🍒

hello!!! it's ok!!! I hope that things are calmer and that you can truly enjoy the holiday season!! I was way better at reading comic books in high school but I kinda fell off it too. but there's a couple I want to get like dark knights of steel, it's the dc heroes but in medieval times! seems fun! I haven't read it yet so I can't say for sure if it is but nico showed me smth from it and 👀. I also want to start reading the new wonder girl and wonder woman, yara flor and nubia seem fun too. I would say my biggest recommendations would be: batman hush (batman, 2 volumes) and blackest night (green lantern, 1 volume but like, all the justice league heroes of that time are in it). I didn't like brightest day as much (the epilogue to blackest night). also if paul dini wrote smth I am generally interested, he wrote my favorite episode of batman the animated series (heart of ice) with mr. freeze that I think about a lot. he had so much depth for a villain on a 22 minute show and batman beat him with a thermos of soup. I also liked the new 52 runs of the flash, green arrow, and wonder woman, but I only got to volume like 6 or 7 for them. as u can likely tell it's been a while since I got any bc new 52 was like 2011-2016 sjgjsldjgskakfjsxk

favorite color: tie between pastel pink, lavender, and pastel blue. pastel bi flag essentially!!

favorite book: you'll never believe what happened to lacey. I love amber ruffin she's so funny so I was so interested in reading her book and some of the shit that happened to her sister is absolutely *disgusting* and fucked up but she and her sister really are so funny in recounting it.

tbh I don't read a ton anymore because I like to write (mostly fanfics) in my free time (I probably have a modest 15 different works in progress, most all are titans fics, a couple works are original stories tho) so I mostly reread what I write bc I'm continually editing and reworking things. my longest work rn is a titans fic that has 24,341 words in the 'main' story then there's one part that I'm reworking that only has 2290 words bc it's being redone and has to get put back into the main story, then I have a big work of 'this will go somewhere in the main story idk where yet but I had this idea' doc that has 13,923 words so total my biggest work has 40,554 words as of today! I don't post my writings anywhere at least rn I don't, I mostly just do them for my own entertainment. mayhaps when I know who u are I can send u a part on discord if u wanted to read it (don't feel obligated btw, like only two people have laid eyes on a single part of a fic I've written, I really just do them for me. also dw there's nothing nsfw in anything I write bc I am not good at writing that stuff so I don't). I struggle with like, descriptions of shit so I want to work on that, a lot of my works are dialogue based esp with fanfic so that's a goal with my writing. I don't wanna drone on for pages like f. scott fitzgerald but a little more description would help things prolly. I say as I drone on for this ask lmaooo

#bpacksanta #🍒 anon #bitch pack secret santa #sorry if u think I am insane