(1) Product placement. Would you like to guess what product is featured in The Martian?
Aston Martin, Omega, and Burberry will be among the brands proud to be associated with Spectre, the latest James Bond movie when it opens next month. But with product placement and promotional tie-ins now generating big bucks for movie-makers, brands eager to share a piece of the big-screen action now extend well beyond the usual suspects.
For proof, look no further than The Martian, the new sci-fi action adventure starring Matt Damon, which opens in the UK later this week complete with… an official potato. Though even this is not the most surprising in a recent series of increasingly bizarre promotional couplings.
…The end result is a promotional campaign for which the film studio used its connections with NASA to provide Albert Bartlett customers with an all-expenses-paid family trip to the Kennedy Space Center as a competition prize in a Martian-themed promotional campaign.
“They wanted exposure. They also knew that, while the film will have big appeal with single blokes, they needed a way to open it up to a wider, family audience,” Marcantonio explains. “Which means it makes sense at a number of different levels. Unlike when soft drinks companies tie up with just about any family movie they can find to reach kids, this tie-up is anything but spurious.”
Indeed. And for a more mundane reason, too. Because like the planet Mars, Albert Bartlett’s best-selling potato – the Rooster – is … red.
(2) Not all of the marketing has been a success.
Remember what I said the other day about not betting against David Gerrold when science fiction cinema is on the line?
His new Facebook post concerns The Martian.
So, here’s my review of The Martian…which I was supposed to see tonight.
The studio’s public relations department is run by idiots.
If you arrange a screening, and if you make passes available to hundreds of fans — warning them ahead of time that you have overbooked and nobody is guaranteed a seat is not an excuse. It’s a cop-out.
You don’t turn away a hundred or more people at the door and shrug it off and say, “Sorry.”
What you do is you say, “Let’s make it up to these people who came all this way and waited all this time.” You go to the management of the theater and say, “We want to schedule a second screening after the first one concludes so that no one goes home disappointed.” That not only gives you good PR with the audience but it helps generate good word-of-mouth three days before the film opens.
The movie might be good. I expect it will be. But the PR people just pissed off at least a hundred fans who waited two hours or longer in line. Not good. Just not good.
(3) Astronaut Clayton C. Anderson, who did get into a screening, wrote this review:
Having already read and enjoyed Weir’s excellent adventure, I was pleasantly surprised with the effective presentation of the novel on screen. Seeing beautiful Martian vistas, punctuated by mountainous terrain in variegated hues of orange, made it seem as if humans were already living there. The use of high-altitude and digitally accurate perspectives of the Martian surface pulled at my heart strings. And I loved that Andy Weir developed a relationship with NASA after publishing the novel, leading the push to involve the space program directly with Scott. The resulting emphasis on science provides an enjoyable balance between the film’s considerable entertainment value and its educational, inspirational, and technological references.
(4) A New Yorker cartoon contains the greatest proof yet of life on Mars….
(5) However, when Rush Limbaugh claims he’s unconvinced NASA found water on Mars, it’s not comedy, it’s tragedy.
RUSH LIMBAUGH: There’s so much fraud. Snerdly came in today ‘what’s this NASA news, this NASA news is all exciting.’ I said yeah they found flowing water up there. ‘No kidding! Wow! Wow!’ Snerdly said ‘flowing water!?’ I said ‘why does that excite you? What, are you going there next week? What’s the big deal about flowing water on Mars?’ ‘I don’t know man but it’s just it’s just wow!’ I said ‘you know what, when they start selling iPhones on Mars, that’s when it’ll matter to me.’ I said ‘what do you think they’re gonna do with this news?’ I said ‘look at the temperature data, that has been reported by NASA, has been made up, it’s fraudulent for however many years, there isn’t any warming, there hasn’t been for 18.5 years. And yet, they’re lying about it. They’re just making up the amount of ice in the North and South Poles, they’re making up the temperatures, they’re lying and making up false charts and so forth. So what’s to stop them from making up something that happened on Mars that will help advance their left-wing agenda on this planet?’ And Snerdly paused ‘oh oh yeah you’re right.’ You know, when I play golf with excellent golfers, I ask them ‘does it ever get boring playing well? Does it ever get boring hitting shot after shot where you want to hit it?’ And they all look at me and smile and say ‘never.’ Well folks, it never gets boring being right either. Like I am. But it doesn’t mean it is any less frustrating.
(6) GeekTyrant says this is the 10-foot inflatable Jabba the Hutt you’re looking for.
Here’s something that’s sure to piss off your neighbors: a ten-foot long, six-foot tall inflatable Jabba the Hutt, perfect for decorating your front lawn or as the centerpiece for that Star Wars-themed party you might be planning. You can bring it with you to wait in line for The Force Awakens, use it as a Home Alone-style distraction to make potential robbers think a large alien lives in your home…the possibilities are too numerous to entertain in one sitting.
“I say put a Santa hat on him and put him in the front yard,” is John King Tarpinian’s advice.
Or give him his own radio show.
From ThinkGeek for $169.99.
(7) Elizabeth Bear lets readers in on the drafting process…
"The blow that struck her came so long before the sound that she almost did not hear the massive [onomatopoeia] that followed." #howprosdoit
— Elizabeth Bear???? (@matociquala) September 29, 2015
(8) Rights to Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold The Moon” have been acquired by Allen Bain’s firm Bainframe. It will be developed for television.
More details on Deadline.com:
Bain (Two Men In Town, Revenge Of The Green Dragons) founded Bainframe to tell stories that have “the power to inspire people to dream of a better tomorrow.” This is the shingle’s second rights buy, following Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn.
…The Man Who Sold The Moon tells the tale of Delos D. Harriman, a businessman possessed by a dream to take humanity off-Earth. As a young entrepreneur, he starts a private space company to colonize the moon and create the home he never had. He is driven to the brink while single-handedly ushering the entire human race to its next evolutionary step.
“This story is inspiring because the private space race is happening now and will become a reality within a decade. This is not some far flung science fiction yarn. It is something we are going to experience in our lifetime,” says Bain. The timing coincides with yesterday’s announcement by NASA of strong evidence there is flowing water on Mars. “The Man Who Sold the Moon allows us to imagine how the space race will play out, but at its core it’s really a gripping portrait of a complex character with an impossible dream.”
Bain notes that Harriman’s journey is reminiscent of the current crop of space pioneers like Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) and Elon Musk (SpaceX) who has credited Heinlein as an inspiration.
(9) WisCon posted a report in June about the results of the first con run under its new anti-abuse policy.
This year was the first convention where we had a formal procedure in place for what to do when individuals attending WisCon violate the code of conduct described in our anti-harassment policy. The policy is intended to be flexible to allow for different situations, but its basic idea is that if somebody reports a harassing behavior to Safety, the person responsible can be issued a warning and asked to do something differently (such as staying away from a place or person). If warnings aren’t attended to or harassing behavior escalates, the policy describes a few more options, including –– in the worst case scenario, which we hope to avoid –– that Safety and Chairs in consultation with available Anti-Abuse Team members can make a collective at-con decision to ban someone from WisCon.
Now that the convention is over, Safety has handed off their at-con reports to the full Anti-Abuse Team, which is reviewing reports that are still open post-con and evaluating how well the policy performed on- site. Here’s how things looked in our first year:
- 11 issues relating to the anti-harassment policy were reported to Safety.
- 4 attendees were issued warnings for harassing behaviors.
- 1 disruptive non-member was escorted off the premises by hotel staff.
- 1 person was banned, after several warnings, in response to reports both from multiple departments and from the hotel –– some relating to patterns of behavior going back several years.
(10) Curbed has a report on a film adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High Rise coming to film festivals.
The novel begins with a truly surreal opening line—”later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog”—and the story explores a societal breakdown similar to of-the-moment entertainment franchises such as The Walking Dead. But in J.G. Ballard’s 1975 High-Rise, the subject of a new film adaptation starting to make the festival rounds this month, the enemy isn’t some virus or the undead. The residents of a new London high-rise slowly regress and devolve into tribal infighting not due to some outside force altering their environment, but because of the environment itself. The tower becomes a character in the story, written as a symbol of the meticulous (and ultimately very fragile) class systems built up by society.
(11) Wired has interviewed David J. Peterson about his new book in “How To Invent A Language, From The Guy Who Made Dothraki”.
Some Conlangers Want to Keep Their Hobby Arcane
Peterson recognizes there are “definitely some negative aspects” to the growth in conlang popularity. He cites linguistic pioneer J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord Of The Rings as an example of the community’s instinct toward self-protection. “There were some people who reacted negatively [when LOTR was published] because they knew conlang would start to get more attention, and they didn’t want that,” he says. Until recently, the community has been a supportive niche for people with a very specific interest. But as television shows and films with created languages continue to pop up in more places, it’s no longer as heavily guarded.
His Book Aims to Codify Conlang Knowledge For Posterity
Constructed languages have existed for centuries, but the advent of the internet brought with it the listserv that created a true community of peers. Since then, the community has grown hugely—but as the internet has changed, a new generation of conlangers on various social networks has become more spread out and unaware of each other. “I’ve met dozens of conlangers on Tumblr, all new, all young, who have no idea that each other exist,” he says, “because they’re with the mass kind of shouting into the wind.” None of them know about the old conlang listserv, and now it’s an antiquated form of digital communication, so “they don’t want to bother with that.” Peterson worries about redundancies that would arise from the lack of connection. “They’re inheriting a kingdom they really don’t know the history of, and know nothing about,” he says. They’re reinventing every single wheel we already perfected.” The Art Of Language Invention is a way of bridging the gap between the old and new conlangers by becoming a codex of sorts, preserving knowledge of constructed language much in the same way ancient languages have been preserved throughout history.
[Thanks to Mark sans surname, Andrew Porter, Ansible Links, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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Oh, hey, has the comic Atomic Robo been suggested? Because it’s awesome and fun with occasional moments of earned pathos. Robo was created by Tesla, went on to found a super-science company called Tesladyne, and has worked with or fought a possible time-travelling dinosaur, Carl Sagan, Edison’s ghost, and a racist xenophobic Lovecraft*.
All of the original run is available on the web these days, where the new issues are coming out. TPBs are still being collected and printed as stories finish.
* in other words: Lovecraft.
@buwaya
Nope. The most outspoken and angry, sure. Just like in the Bay Area, where the most outspoken blowhards are on the left. The most outspoken blowhards in the Midwest are on the right. I have many relatives with whom I strongly disagree about politics, but I am able to have functioning relationships with all but the most far-right. And yes, it is enlightening to see things from outside your bubble. You, buwaya, present as always an offensive caricature of my aforementioned relatives (and friends, and family friends and acquaintances) from the heartland.
RedWombat, <applause>
And RedWombat slams it out of the park.
If we’re nominating comics/graphic novels, I’ll put in a word for we3.
Red Wombat: Awesome! My psychic powers tell me this comment will feature in today’s Scroll. Just a feeling….
*grin* Thanks, guys!
Now there’s some considered and reflective thought. Conflating rejecting a worldview with rejecting the reality that there are people who hold that worldview. Never mind all the other assumptions. People in glass bubbles, and all that.
RedWombat, you are utterly amazing! That was just–I got to the end and I went back and read the whole thing out loud, just for the sound of the words. Any chance you might consider a broadsheet of it?
Re: Judge Dredd
Superfan partner suggests Graveyard Shift (for Dredd doing what Dredd does best) or the first Judge Death saga (for special storyline). Both chosen with an eye to being reasonably accessible to people who aren’t Dredd fans as they don’t require reading a ton of backstory.
@Mary Frances – Well, all credit goes to T. S. Eliot for the original! I don’t know what’s involved in a broadsheet, but I’d be happy to consider it!
RedWombat on October 1, 2015 at 10:47 am said
I…
Complex feelings…
I don’t want to be glad we have trolls just because it prompts such delightful posts as these.
But…
Trollicksome! That’s going to make me happy all day.
@RedWombat – I would feel pride for helping to inspire that amazing and jellicle filk, if I weren’t feeling shame at having helped inspire it.
A belated comics recommendation because I haven’t been reading all of the comment threads recently and this is the first I’ve heard of a comics bracket: Elfquest.
Cheering for (at?) RedWombat rather lessened the intense emotional impact of this for a moment, but it came back:
To the extent this educates you at all about how I really think through these things, it is a mark against you: you should already have assumed I considered these sorts of things.
That may be the essence of respect for others, that assumption that – in the absence of pretty overwhelming evidence otherwise – they are capable of thought at least as deep and nuanced as oneself. If people meet with that baseline, conversation across all sorts of divides is possible.
Without it, it’s like trying to converse with the mean, drunk uncle you don’t like enough to invite over for Thanksgiving.
More comics: I’m not at the end of these comments yet but I haven’t seen suggestions of these:
Green Arrow: the Longbow Hunters – story and art by Mike Grell (a lovely self contained story, although his run of the comic immediately after is pretty good. The art is charcoal style sketches and paintings, and done by an archer)
Fullmetal Alchemist – Hiromu Arakawa. Really, the manga fans skipped this? Maybe my tastes are low but I adored it.
The below are on my list but I don’t expect anyone else to agree:
Wonder Woman – The George Perez reboot in 1987, issues 1 until he quit as artist.
” – The Gail Simone run. These are the only two people I’ve seen who genuinely tried to express this character as something other than a run-of-the mill superhero, who tried to really look at what her origin story meant, and at the religious aspects thereof.
Has anyone mentioned Mike Grell’s Warlord? If not …
@Lenora Rose:
Heck, I respect that run just for his being consistent in using the Greek names of the myths rather than mixing Greek and Roman. (Using Heracles instead of the better-known Hercules, for the most obvious example.) But yes, it was a wonderful example of treating Diana of Themyscira as a person first, an ambassador second, and a superhero only when needed.
Definitely agree on the Perez WW run. I wouldn’t include Longbow Hunters since, while good, Grell was deliberately taking away every sf/fantasy element he could possibly manage; Black Canary’s powers, Green Arrow’s trick high tech arrows, etc. So I wouldn’t classify it as sf or fantasy in the traditional meanings of same.
Tom Galloway: Agreed that it isn’t SF/F – but we haven’t definitely concluded yet if we’re sticking with F/SF or not. Unless I missed it?
+1s, btw, for Girl Genius, Digger, Elfquest, We3, and Nausicaa.
oh, and one more: Rather than Bryan Talbot’s Luther Arkwright, which was merely ok, how about his Tale of one Bad Rat?
Comics-wise, I haven’t seen anyone mention Stray Bullets, by David Lapham. It’s been years since I read it, but I recall it being noiry and well-written. No SFNAL content, from what I recall, though.
Also, Small Favors, by Colleen Coover. I think you could say it has SFNAL content, but it’s also pretty much pornography. Gentle and often sweet pornography, but still pretty smutty.
People are people too,
Except Simon McJosephson who is just completely made up.
Weird. I just tried to post a couple comics recommendations, but the post disappeared. If posts go into moderation, do they disappear to the poster? Usually I see them sitting there with a “waiting for moderation” disclaimer.
One of my recommendations was for a bawdy comic (pretty sure that’s a safe word to use, if other words in my previous post flagged it to the auto-moderator bot), which is why I wonder.
ETA: I also worry this has something to do with the fact that I have FOUR File770 tabs open right now on my browser. Just to keep updated, I guess? Maybe there were five Pixel Scrolls open back when I posted that one, and I added a comment to some thread that’s languishing in the depths of last week?
As far as I know, Trina drew 4 issues of a Wonder Woman mini-series and a short story in an annual, and wrote a Wonder Woman special drawn by Colleen Doran, but hasn’t had more of a “run” on WW than that. [Collecting it all would make a nice book collection, mind you, if only Trina was a marketable name that DC would want to collect…]
But if you’re thinking of her LEGEND OF WONDER WOMAN run, I’d be flattered to see it appear, since I wrote it.
@Kathodus
No awaiting moderation notice usually means it’s been eaten by the spam filter.
Does anyone else remember the comic strip Mary Perkins: On Stage? It ran from the late 50s to the late 70s and concerned a lovely New York actress who had various adventures making movies and TV shows and doing plays all over the world, with lots of adventure, romance and soapy stuff. I honestly don’t remember if there are any SFF elements other than a Lon Chaney like Man of a Thousand Faces and a Phantom of the Opera type person. But it’s a very good comic strip.
@Mark – thanks. I’ll re-post. Carefully. I just remembered a third rec, too, so…
I’m not sure if any of these fit SFNAL, but… comics just seem inherently fantastical to me, outside the purely autobiographical stuff. Anyway…
Stray Bullets, David Lapham – I haven’t read it in years and can’t even begin to imagine which pile of old comics I’d have to dig through to find it, but it was an excellent crime/noir comic.
Small Favors, Colleen Coover – may have sent me into the spamtrap. A gentle, fun, very *ahem* bawdy comic that actually has a SFNAL premise. Admittedly, that premise is just setup for the action, but still, it’s SFNAL.
Naughty Bits, Roberta Gregory – hilarious and awesome.
+1 for Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind, and I’ll raise you Mushishi.
@RedWombat awesome thanks for making me smile
@Jim Henley thank you so much. This really says it all:
@Cheryl
This. So much.
Ooh yeah!
RedWombat: I don’t know what’s involved in a broadsheet, but I’d be happy to consider it!
Well, I don’t know what’s involved in producing a broadsheet either, though I’ve bought a few of them over the years. Want to ask someone who might know? I’ve got a friend who has published a few, I believe . . .
Comics:
2001 Nights
Mai The Psychic Girl
And from Crisis, the SF suffused superhero deconstruction, The New Statesmen.
(I’d suggest Talbot’s Alice In Sunderland for the GN brackets, but I was one of Bryan’s source photographers for the book – the full page picture of the Angel Of The North on page 306 is from one of my photos.)
Simon Bisson: Also, Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland: what a fascinating slice of SF, deconstructing the dystopia/utopia dynamic. I can see why it was a commercial flop, but it’s now on my BDP:LF long list as possibly the best example of SF in dialogue with itself I’ve seen in a long time.
I saw Tomorrowland on the plane during my Worldcon trip. I enjoyed it. I expected it to be predictable, and it wasn’t.
Listed it in my first batch of recommendations. It’s one of the best-written/best-drawn comic strips in newspaper strip history.
And a small company called Classic Comics Press has been, the last batch of years, reprinting the entire series in a 15-volume set. The first 14 are out, the last one is due in January. So if anyone’s at all interested, hie thee off to Amazon (or retailer of choice) and give it a shot, it’s great stuff.
There was also X. Boomer Bailey, Mary’s fairy godfather, who may or may not have had magic powers.
Len Starr was an amazing mixture of genius and craftsman. He made it all look easy and simple. While other “soap opera” strips were full of flailing and overacting and dopey plots (I’m looking at you, HEART OF JULIET JONES), ON STAGE was smart, nuanced, warm, human, deft and displayed an affectionate sense of irony about life. It wasn’t really a soap or a melodrama (although it had both within it). It was a drama strip, with writing that the rest of the field couldn’t compete with.
Starr never wanted to do the writing, and looked for someone to pass it off to, but he never found anyone, because he was just too damn good. Archie Goodwin, one of comics’ best writers, assisted Starr briefly, and described the process as one where Star would give him a rough story idea, Archie would flesh it out, and Starr would scrap it all and do it over, much better than Archie imagined it could be done.
But then, other comic strips were taking their cues from movies, TV, slick-magazine stories and such, while Starr’s bible was THE ART OF DRAMATIC WRITING by Lajos Egri. As a writer, he thought of himself as a technician, but if so, he sure knew how the machine worked…
Plus, he was the absolute best at bringing readers up to speed every three panels or so without ever (or, well, hardly ever) making it look forced or clumsy. Whenever I think I need a refresher in natural-sounding exposition (which is probably most of the time!), I go to Starr for it.
Sorry if I’m going on too long. It’s really a wonderful strip.
*quietly admiring RedWombat and Jim Henley*
I’m still amused by the idea of left-wing agenda water on Mars. And I’ve been struck before by the similarity in rhetorical style between the Puppies and right-wing hate radio personalities, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it has happened again.
I’ll be interested to see how the comics brackets come out but I haven’t read enough comics to contribute in any kind of useful way. I’m kind of hoping my library will have some of these, actually. We’ll see.
Oh yes, Mai the Psychic Girl, the first actual manga I ever read! (As opposed to Elfquest, which was the comic that introduced me to manga without my realizing it was so heavily influenced by manga.)
I’m pretty sure Legends of Wonder Woman was indeed the one I was thinking of.
Another classic from Japan: They Were Eleven.
Jim Henley, thank you for that.
I am always bemused (or perhaps amused) when a dialogue on a subject occurs and another person assumes that my opinion on politics, religion, racism, feminism, climate change (or even on the Stolen Generations) is something at which I arrived this morning — rather than the result of a great deal of reading, thought, discussion, and experience… perhaps many, many years of it.
And RedWombat, The Jellicle Troll is wonderful.
I’m still amused by the idea of left-wing agenda water on Mars.
Obama controls all of the water on Mars with his army of unstoppable robots.
Note that I don’t claim that they should likewise reject YOU. I am here, after all, not off commiserating with my friends at Freerepublic.
You are here because you are a troll.
You are not at freerepublic because trolls don’t shit on their own doorstep.
No one here is interested in your vapid opinions, yet you still post here because you have absoluteley no respect for other people, because you are a troll.
You repeat obvious falsehoods because you dont respect people enough to be have honest interactions with them, because you are a troll.
Were the people at freerepublic heavily vested on there not being water on mars? What is their position on the Europa ocean question? Or is Europa too close to Europe, and therefore automatically suspect?
I suspect he’s also here because so many people interact with him. He might get more respect from many posters here than he does elsewhere in the sense people respond frequently to his points.
I’m not reading his comments yet I know what the conversation he’s involved in is about just by reading everyone’s responses.
Comics: I’m going to recc comics that haven’t been mentioned, that are worth including in the brackets.
A Miracle of Science by Jon Kilgannon, with art by Mark Sachs, has at least one volume published, so it should count. I’m rereading it, and the relationship between police officer Benjamin Prester, his partner Caprice Quevillion and Mars is still a lot of fun to read.
Everblue by Michael Sexton has pdf compilations, so this story of a quiet across a water-covered world is worth recommending.
Over the Wall and Stonebreaker by Peter Wartman, are beautifully drawn stores about the demon-haunted city and the girl who enters it to save her brother.
Namesake by Megan Lavey-Heaton and Isabelle Melançon. Utterly gorgeous, finally written and moving story about Namesake, people who can visit worlds based on the worlds of fantasy, writers, who can alter those worlds, and the conspiracies that wish to control them.
Blindsprings by Kadi Fedoruk. A princess who made a pact with the spirits is rescued against her will and brought out into a city…three hundred years after she disappeared. Incredible artwork and an interesting story.
Regular comics:
Stinz, by Donna Barr. The story of a center who goes through not-World War 1, sms his feeling with the aftermath.
Dirty Pair, Run from the Future, by Adam Warren. Takes on the transhumanist genre as the two accident prone trouble consultants are given 100 minutes to arrest a bunch of criminals on an independent habitat. Nothing can go wrong, right?
If we’re doing regular comics have we mentioned Alison Bechdel yet? Fun Home might be an obvious pick, but I will mainly associate her with the slender collections of the Dykes to Watch Out For strips.
Comics: Weapon Brown, which is seriously over-the-top non-work-safe dystopia, with the twist that every character is a warped riff on a classic cartoon character. The title character, for instance, wears a distinctive zig-zag striped shirt.
For Stinz, that’d be a centaur, not a center.
Kurt beat me to mentioning the reprinting of On Stage: (and then described and raved about it better than I ever could to boot). On the other hand, while reading v14, I started thinking about maybe going through all the volumes to figure out just how many of Mary’s acting jobs actually resulted in play performances, broadcast television, or movies that made it to the theater. Because particularly in v14, it seemed that an awful lot of her jobs ended up with nothing actually shown to the public due to all the plot happening behind the scenes leading to shut down productions and the like.
Oh, I should have more to say about the topic of comics, since I was a close friend for many decades of Rory “Comic Book Guy” Root, but Rory and I bonded over SF and boardgames, and I never got into the comic scene like he did. (Which is why Neil Gaiman will not write my eulogy.)
Um, um, I don’t think anyone has mentioned 100 Bullets by Azzarello and Risso? First-rate noirish fantasy. Or The Unwritten by Carey and Gross? Which could be described as Jasper Fforde meets Lovecraft, maybe? I dunno. Both more than worthy of consideration, I think.
If we’re including Webcomics, has anyone mentioned Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Sidell? I discovered this one because it was recommended by the aforementioned Neil Gaiman. Like Girl Genius, it’s an ongoing story, rather than a joke-a-day strip. Really outstanding. Surreal, funny, and, at times, very moving. With a fabulous mashup of mythologies.
+1 to Transmetropolitan, Fables, The Boys, and Girl Genius.
@ Jim Henley That was really beautiful and thoughtful and kind. If you have the time, will and energy to do so, I’d really love to hear more of your thoughts on arrogance/pride.
I read that first, shorter comment of yours and thought, “Yes, *that’s* what is making me so annoyed, and why I can’t bear to read certain commenters.” It’s almost as if they’re using this condescending pomposity as a weapon, and I honestly don’t get why it works? (God, this probably makes no sense at all; I will be turning this over in the back of my mind all night, but right now it’s off to the ballet. All Balanchine night!)