beccatoria | I wasn't dead, I was reading comics...

Dudes, it has been nearly a month since I posted. Apologies, I'm not dead or anything. Honestly it's a combination of a fairly bullshit filled realworld existence right now - I've been pretty stressed out. Haven't even been vidding, though I have some collab work that'll hopefully ease me back into it. Plus there's just not been that much going on in the world of the livejournals; no telly to discuss during hiatus season, no one releasing any vids cus we're like a month out from VVC. It's summer, we're all too hot, too cranky and too sleepy, right? ;)

So, I did the obvious, and while everyone on my flist fell for My Little Pony as their happy animated stressfree escapism, I decided to get around to watching all those DC universe animated flicks they've been churning out for a few years now that I've been meaning to watch forever. Partly it was sparked by the DC reboot announcement, partly because - before the reboot was even announced, though it was nifty timing - we finally got back to our actual weekly Sunday DC-universe RPG game. We'd been playing with the Mutants & Masterminds rules way back, but now, with the actual licensed DC rulebook with all the licensed art, even with minimal rules changes, it feels all glossy and shiny, and it's kinda cool to actually get to look in the back of the book and see how you stack up against Superman. (Hint: poorly... :p)

So anyways, here's the lowdown on me and comics. DC comics specifically. Like every geeky girl my age, I hit fourteen and discovered Sandman. I also pick up monthly comics for Star Wars, at the moment for Farscape, previously for BSG. I like comics, they're a great medium. But I was never really a Marvel or a DC girl. Partly because it was just too damn big to know where to start, but that wasn't it really. After all, I worked out the Star Wars expanded universe just fine - in fact, it's why I buy as many comics as I do right now. And I grew up in a world with animated X-Men and JLA cartoons, in a subculture of geeks where no one needed to explain to me who Green Lantern was, even if they did need to explain Guy Gardiner.

Cus I love superheroes. Some of you might have worked that out from other characters: I like it when suddenly they are magical super heroes. I loved it when it happened to Olivia Dunham, it's the main reason I'm not freaking out about River Song, and I may have had a (TO ME) hilarious running joke with a realworld friend that Laura Roslin was secretly the Goddamn Batman and swooped through the lower decks cleaning shit up that Adama didn't have the guts to handle.

But...the comics. Eh. Bluntly, too many times when I did try to read them they weren't that well-written (in comics' defense, this was at a point when I was largely at the mercy of my local library's very old, very outdated graphic novel section), or if they were I didn't know what the fuck was going on because it was in the middle of a huge arc and I'd get frustrated with the little asterisks telling me to go read issue whatever of whatever so I could find out the rest of the story. (Once I tried, I honestly fucking tried, to follow a DC event and I managed to buy the wrong bloody comic twice and gave up). Plus, okay, let's be honest, we all know where the term "women in refrigerators" came from, and it doesn't look that much prettier on the other wrong sides of being ~~Bruce Wayne~~ a white, straight, cisgendered, able-bodied, neurotypical* dude either. *hence strikethrough...

Plus, everything you ever love will eventually be undone due to some kind of reality flux or a deal with a devil or an external reboot.

Still, though. Let's circle around to the DC vs Marvel question. I'm pretty much a DC girl through and through, and it's not just because I love an underdog and Marvel are currently riding higher on all their film successes, and I still, vehemently, stubbornly do not understand why Superman Returns flopped and honestly think Green Lantern was okay!

It's because Marvel doesn't have much to offer me to get past those gateway issues. (Although, caveat: I do like the X-Men as a...verse unto itself. I think it offers something different to the superhero genre in broad terms, and I do wish it wasn't confined to the same elastic timeframe and could instead spread out more like the Star Wars EU, but I'm also not really a big enough fan to feel comfortable getting into that debate, so I should probably leave that to more knowledgeable folks than me).

So what does DC have to get me through that? The characters.

People look at me funny when I say that. There's this perception, I think - I say from the periphery of comics - I say based on what I know as a quasi fangirl among other quasi fanboys (we'll get to that in a minute) - that Marvel write more rounded people. Characters with flaws. And I kind of see the point. I certainly think they're more relateable. But that's what I love about DC. Their characters feel mythic; they feel archetypal. It's easy to see that with someone like Superman who is a blunt stand-in for Jesus, really. Or Wonder Woman who is explicitly depicted in the context of a divine pantheon.

But even someone like Batman - the best analogue I can think of in the Marvelverse is probably Iron Man - both mentally unstable rich genius orphans who use gadgets - feels infinitely more like a legend - the Dark Knight Detective - than Tony Stark ever will.

Which in turn gives me a way to deal with those issues I mentioned. Not so much the representational ones, but the issue of how everything turns around, is retold, undone, done again. That's...frustrating in a longterm narrative but acceptable in a mythic cycle.

How I always used to read comics is, once every now and again, I'd be like, dammit, comics! I'm in the mood for superheroes, and I'd up and go get some graphic novels, and I'd tend to go for the Elseworld type stuff, the alternate universes, or the things that seemed pretty self-contained, like Supergirl and the Legion, or Red Sun, or whatever. Here is a story about this hero we all know already. If I was in charge of comics, that's probably how I'd do it. An endless series of what-ifs and could have beens. This series will run six issues, or sixty issues and within that you can really do stuff. You can break through the stasis that 70 years tends to bring to the major characters, without the inevitable need to reboot it again because the reboot becomes part of the experience. "This is an imaginary story, but aren't they all?"

Which isn't to say I'm at complete zen with it. It probably is why I don't know I'll ever really be able to get into DC as a serious fandom, because for that I do think I need to be invested in actual ongoing plots more than simply amazing one-shots for, what have essentially become, my pantheon of fictional deities.

Honestly, I think it's not overstating to say that, and I'm far from the first to do so. But DC superheroes fill that hole in my geek culture - they provide the mythic cycle, the pantheon of gods, the owned-by-everyone-always-been-there stories that you can invest as much or little as you want in, that are always changing and always staying the same.

Probably it's because I only ever really had one friend who was a hardcore comics geek but I have had many, many friends who are softcore like me and none of us is ever up to date with what's going on, or read the same books, and when we talk about them we're like, "Wait isn't he the one that did that thing?" "Oh, no, no, he's the one that did that other thing - he's really cool because of xyz!" "Really? I thought he was more abc!" "No, dude, there was this cool story I read/episode of JLU I saw where he was definitely xyz!" And we sort of end up building up these characters in ways that don't always add up to the way we'd probably see them if we read their ongoing books or thought too hard about it and might make a different group of geeks with a different understanding of ~~Zeus~~ Superman look at us sideways and go, "Whut?" but...I dunno. It's kind of always what I've liked about it.

And, um, that's my rant on why I like DC more than Marvel and how I engage with it.

THAT SAID.

I'm...slowly being convinced that maybe I should engage with it a little bit more actively, the way it was originally intended. Maybe with this new DC reboot, I should dip my toe in the water and see and pick up some books on a monthly basis and see how it goes.

Among other things this has inspired me to watch the DC Animated Movies I mentioned above? By and large, they're fun enough, and range from the awful (Green Lantern: First Flight, sorry, but just...it was boring and Hal Jordan literally had no personality other than obnoxious), to the great (Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, Justice League: New Frontier), to the dammit-you-were-almost-brilliant (Wonder Woman - it was doing pretty great for a while, but honestly they either needed to tone down Trevor's asshattery or not have them get together at the end; one accidental foot through a lasso ain't enough, people!), to the utterly surprising (Batman: Under the Red Hood, I basically did not expect to enjoy 75 minutes of Bat Angst but bloody hell, suddenly that final Batman-Red Hood-Joker confrontation happened and it was un-fucking-believably tense and heartbreaking and good, and frankly I think Batman came out of it looking like a total moral hypocrit, which I'm not sure was the message I was supposed to take but whatever). Honestly, aside from First Flight I at least enjoyed them all. And a few were more intellectually engaging than I was expecting. I may have to vid bits of them sometime.

Then going on from there I decided to actually start reading through some of my husband's comics since they were lying around (he engages with them on a similar level to me, albeit he read them more during his childhood, while I didn't really find them til I was about 14 as I said before), since, like me, he's being a bit more comic booky lately since it's What's Going On Right Now. And one of them was Wonder Woman: the Circle which is the start of Gail Simone's run. And he was like, "Yes, you'll like that one," and I'm like, "Wait, this is the Wonder Woman run I've been told a bunch of times to read, right?"

OH MY GOD WONDER WOMAN. I LOVE YOU.

But, that is a post for another time. Like I think I should actually gather my thoughts on Wonder Woman and all the amazing things Gail Simone does with her and all the confusing things Gail Simone does with her, and all that stuff, and post on it separately because it's worth it.

And now I'm back to trying to find that Supergirl and the Legion novel I know I have lying around that I never got around to finishing (because let's face it, I love the Legion for their tacky 50s/80s mish-mash of weird Peter Pan hope and stupidity, but I wasn't enormously taken with the writing quality of Kara's first few adventures with them).

And I'm considering which comics to get come September. My husband is also interested in picking some up and there are quite a few we're both interested in, so we're agreed on seven right now. We don't wanna pick up too many - who knows if I'll even have a job by then, but ten doesn't seem excessive so there are about three open slots on the potential roster if anyone (okay, it ain't like I have a bunch of comic fans on my flist, but you never know!) has any suggestions:

In the order I randomly remember them:

Catwoman: This is mostly for K - he's an enormous Batman fan (though to his credit this includes a keen understanding that he's actually a pretty damn selfish character and dislikes it when stories try too hard to make him look Secretly Noble and Tortured), and considers Catwoman and Robin the two most important other characters in his mythology. Personally I think Joker needs to be in there too, but K disagrees and whatever, it's his pick. And I am interested to see where they go with a solo story for her - where she'll fall on the hero/villain line.

Batgirl: Okay, honesty, I have deeply conflicted feelings about this, and I'm not even deep into comics; I can't imagine how confusing it must be for people who are. On the one hand, I firmly believe that what happened to Barbara Gordon originally was an example of not refrigeration, but the related phenomenon of women being more likely to be tragically hurt/depowered/rendered less important on a more permanent basis than male characters. While it's true that specifically in Batman mythology we have the death of Jason Todd (who also eventually returned, but whatever, it was a long time), he was mostly killed off because he was massively unpopular - it then became a dark, integral, compelling part of the Batstory. Generally speaking, though, Batman breaks his back and gets better, Barbara Gordon breaks her back and is permanently paralysed. However, for almost my whole life, Barbara Gordon has been a superhero in a wheelchair. Which you know, hell with female superheroes, how many disabled ones do we have? Whatever unfair gender politics put her there, once she was there she became something pretty extraordinary - an incredibly popular, incredibly competent, physically disabled superhero, who, yes, retrained to use her brain more than her body, but who was also still depicted as an athlete, as someone physically capable despite being differently abled. Oracle was a freaking kickass superheroine. Losing that is also not something to be taken lightly. Honestly, one of the reasons I want to read this is because it's Gail Simone, who I previously knew by reputation and am now starting to know through experience has not been overhyped to me. The women who coined the term "women in refrigerators" is writing this. The woman who has, in part, made her name (or at least helped cement an already formidable one) writing for Oracle over the past few years is writing this. I'm not sure if anyone else could pull it off, but I will trust Gail Simone and I want to see what she does with it.

Supergirl: This is all me. I love Supergirl. I MAKE NO APOLOGIES! Though I am nervous to see what they do with her. I'll always love her, but she's at her least interesting when she's the impulsive teenager to Superman's controlling older brother. But I really love when they come at her from a different angle. That her desire for more direct intervention doesn't necessarily come from youthful impetuousness, or if it does, that doesn't mean it's ethically wrong or lacking in wisdom. My favourite way of dividing the two is that Superman catches you when you fall, but is afraid of intervening in free will and human history, so that's all he'll do. Supergirl wants to know, why can't we teach people not to fall? In a crude way it's like...humanitarian aid versus nation building and all the perils of colonialism versus shirked responsibility to those in need. But honestly, again, this is probably one of those times where I've grabbed hold of her characterisation in a couple of stories and put together my own mythic image of her, and I'm bound to be dissapointed. ;) But she's still be Super Awesome, so it's fine.

Wonder Woman: I probably would have picked it up out of curiosity even before READING ALL OF GAIL SIMONE'S WONDER WOMAN RUN. But it's a must-have now. I'm just hoping I like it better than the J Michael Straczynski run which I briefly tried to read last year but didn't get into. That said, armed with a better understanding of/more love for Wonder Woman, I do intend to revisit that and see if I like it better second time around.

Mr Terrific: This is K's pick, and I'm sad to say I don't know a great deal about him beyond what I've picked up from the cameos he's made in our RPG game. Therefore in my mind he's sort of like what Bruce Wayne might have been if he was, um, happier and not messed up and wandered around in the daytime with FAIR PLAY on his jacket instead of at night trying to terrify dock workers. And had a billion PhDs instead of one PhD in DETECTING ANGST. I am, however, entirely down with that kind of a person, so I will give this a shot.

Green Lantern Corps: We both wanna read this. I've always loved the idea of the Green Lanterns (and all the other Corps), for the way they are simultaneously surreal and odd and strange and full of bizarre Star Wars Cantina-style aliens, while at the same time being really pretty damn Epic and Mythic in a kind of simple, universal way. I mean, okay it was them blue dudes, but igniting a star with the power of hope? Epic. So yes, the Corps is more interesting than the human dude, sorry.

Justice League of America: Cus you know, might as well at least give it a shot. Though honestly, we're mostly picking this up cus I suggested it and it seems like a kind of flagship-ish book to get. Relatedly, I still think that if they wanted to live up to their declaration that they wanted a more diverse line-up in their reboot, it might have been good to put more than a token black dude and a token chick in the freaking Justice League core group. Sorry Aquaman, but I'd swap you out for Black Canary, and Hal, I'd toss you for John. I can just about get why they'd want Hal not John for Green Lantern since it's like, from the blurb, possibly their origin story, and they want the big, recognisable names. Not that that addresses the impossibility of getting to reboot and restart all the Iconic Characters when a lot of them were invented decades ago when comics was even whiter than they are now. However, as I said, I understand the decision even if I don't agree with it. But then, why the bloody hell is Guy Gardiner on Justice League International?! Jeebus, guys, at least give John Stewart that slot, he's a popular guy. HE WAS IN THE CARTOON AND EVERYTHING. BLAH.

You may notice that we're not picking up Superman (whom I love) or Batman (whom K loves). Can't really explain why other than to point back to that stuff about mythic figures, etc. Superman is probably my alltime favourite hero, but I often find it hard to connect to him in a monthly series; I think the thing is, he's really hard to write for because he's pretty perfect, and Batman kind of has the opposite problem, it's too easy to turn him into an angst-muffin or a psycho. Either way they aren't characters I guess we feel the need to read about monthly to excitedly find out more about them.

Aaaaaaand, that's my line-up. Any pitches for additions/subtractions?

(It does occur to me if I'd posted this in smaller chunks over the course of the months, it would be kinder to everyone. OH WELL. Don't worry flist, I really do know that 95% of you have no idea what I'm talking about and the other 5% are probably busy. But it was fun to actually write out the reasons I like DC cus I've never done that before, and I do so love to list stuff. Anyway, ♥ to you all!)