Batgirl #8! (Also, yes, I'm still alive!) (Also other comics!)

[beccatoria]

Hey guys - just checking in and letting you all know that I'm still alive, and REALLY SORRY it's been so long since I've posted. I've only been quiet because really nothing's going on much in my life right now and I'm WAY behind on almost all telly so I don't have much to say right now. Mostly my life has been consumed with what began as a casual project whereby I was going to actually clip stuff before vidding a vid I wasn't even sure I could/wanted to make and somehow spiralled into a weird completionist cataloguing project. I'M NEVER DOING IT AGAIN.

ANYWAY, I finally have something worth posting about!


...holy shit, Batgirl. Not simple, not what I expected, the stuff with her mom, if it’s true, it makes half of it better and half of it worse. The stuff with the guy, damn that was a piece of catharsis and I think a lesser comic woulda fallen over into maudlin or cheese, but this, this pulls all the tension you didn’t know was in your lungs straight out of your mouth.

And then there’s that cliffhanger.

So yeah. Holy shit, Batgirl. There you are.

In addition, Batwoman is just kicking ass. It's so...rich and just all about these women with these really complicated, challenging, distinct relationships with each other. It's about power, competence, loss, betrayal, romance, ass-kicking, and supernatural noir detective work. One of my favourite things about it is that nearly everything passes the Bechdel test, and the cast is almost entirely gender reversed from the male/female split you'd expect (it's what, four or five women vs two guys in the regular/recurring roles?), but it never feels like that's what it's doing. It just feels completely natural to the point I don't even want to be mentioning it here because the comic just is. But obviously I AM going to mention it because then more of you might start reading it! :D?

Demon Knights also continues to be a hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking tale of...something or other; I'm really enjoying it. It's not Secret Six, nothing else ever will be, I don't think, but I do wonder if this book might fill part of that void. And on top of that it's got beautiful art.

Finally, two comments:

Wonder Woman: oh god, I think it broke my heart. I don't even have the desire to go into detail about why. I don't even have the energy to be angry, I'm too sad. If it were ugly or poorly written that would be easier. As it is, it's a beautifully written, visually gorgeous story that wounded me in my soul, and not in a good way. I just...I don't know dudes. I guess we'll see where it goes.

Saga: this, on the other hand, was interesting weirdness. I've read the first two now, and what I wish I could do most is sum up the type of WORLD it is, because I think if I could, I could explain what's so compelling about it. I suppose it's like...a space fairytale with a dirty mouth and a rocketship forest full of nightmares? Anyway, I'm hooked is what I'm saying.

Comments

[swatkat24.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of hoping there will be more to the Wonder Woman story? I don't know, I'm just heartbroken too.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Ugh, I'd love it if there was but I really don't believe there will be. I think it's in there for worldbuilding and background and while the plot point or characters introduced may or may not be frequently used in future, I don't think it was set up with the goal of doing anything more than saying, "hey look, it's gritty, dark and mythic," the way a lot of the rest of the worldbuilding has been?

Again, I'd love to be proved wrong, for this to be some sort of setup and for us to find out Azzarello was trying to say something totally different but I just...it fits too well into the rubric of the bloody, nightmarish modern mythology take he's been pushing for me to believe that. :(

But, like I said, I do live in hope of being wrong.

[swatkat24.livejournal.com]

That was pretty much my reaction, yes, but Ragnell's argument here and a couple other posters in CBR did raise my hopes somewhat... But no, I'm not holding my breath. I'm just heartbroken.

[cyborganize.livejournal.com]

UGH CLIPPING. we still haven't sorted out this problem. I didn't clip for the last video I made -- it was all short bits of source and I didn't care about quality. but it turns out that Final Cut Express has to take interminable time rendering everything in the timeline unless source is a very specific format, so it makes more sense to clip episodes in order to convert them without losing quality. or we may just need to pirate Final Cut Pro which is supposed to be more forgiving in terms of what video formats it can work with. anyway, I sympathize! the "completionist cataloguing project" is a big obstacle to me actually VIDDING.

I don't know what happened in Wonder Woman! :((((((((

OMG we should have more regular chats about OUAT, though. it has been SO GOOD.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Yeah, fortunately for other fandoms I'll be able to return to my refusal to clip, it's just this is video game footage and so...the rules are sort of different. GAH. WHAT AM I DOING.

That sucks about FCE and its clipping problems though. To be honest, Cinelerra is a little crappy in terms of the formats it can accept, so I often end up re-encoding entire episodes and using up more space than I'd like to in order to not lose too much quality (and gah I wish I hadn't discovered that I can vid using x264 encoded footage because it's so much prettier and generally logoless but slows Cinelerra down to a crawl and it's a little like being in WMM again o.O), but I just can't handle the clipping. I might as well have my completionist project just BE the series! I think the problem with the video game footage is I keep thinking, "hey, now I can rewatch this without having to replay the whole game..." and that's how it starts. And then I end up wanting to clip the hilarious ambient dialogue I couldn't even use to vid because it's freaking DIALOGUE. *facepalm*

...you don't want to know what happened in Wonder Woman. metatxt CERTAINLY doesn't want to know, lest she explode in righteous, understandable rage. The short version is they wrecked the Amazons in a fairly horrifying way. Apparently every thirty years or so they go daterape a bunch of sailors then murder them in order to keep up their population numbers, and all the boy babies get traded to Hephaestus for weaponry because otherwise they'd be so useless they might as well get drowned. No really. The next issue toyed with my feelings by letting Wonder Woman use her LASSO TO TIE UP HER HAIR which NGL was INCREDIBLY HOT but also didn't fix, or even reference, anything from the shitty last issue. I'm not sure if that's better (because I can pretend it will NEVER BE MENTIONED AGAIN) or worse because it implies it wasn't even fucking important to the plot that they do it. :/

I was just. AZZARELLO. WE WERE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU. And like I said, if the rest of the story was awful, it would be easier. But it's like this brutal, ugly, inexplicable decision in the middle of this beautiful, fantastic story and I have no idea how to handle that.

OUAT THOUGH! THAT IS HAPPIER! I'm actually behind on it - I'm behind on ALL TV but I really, really need to catch up and we DEFINITELY need to talk more about it! ♥

[cyborganize.livejournal.com]

We pirated Final Cut Pro, so that should give us more options for video formats. :)

After watching your vid, I can see why you ended up with an unwieldy clipping project! I can also see why you'd want to "watch" the game without playing through it -- *I* kind of want to!

And uh, I can see why the Wonder Woman thing would be distressing in context, but the way you described it, it sounded hilariously awesome! I mean, how else are Amazons supposed to get babies?