Other Ever Afters

Melanie Gillman's Other Ever Afters is a cute collection of graphic short stories. Maybe fables? They are not as heavy-handed as traditional fables, and they center feelings and belonging. The back copy describes the book as "original, feminist, queer fairy tales" but the queerness is a light touch because they are fairy tales, so the important bits are things like "there is a giant outside our village" and "the goose-keeper lives outside the castle". The drawings are bright and softly round-edged and lovely.

It's overall cute, and a quick little collection of stories.

This post's theme word is pussivant (v. intr.), "to meddle, fuss, move around busily." The villagers pussivanted around the square in an attempt to find the yearly sacrificial maiden.

We Can Fix It!

Jess Fink's We Can Fix It! is a brief graphic novel that investigates the question: what if you could travel back in time to formative points in your youthful memories, to try to advise your younger self against making embarrassing mistakes?

What follows is a series of comedic exchanges. Some people never change, and the self-awareness to realize this makes the entire comic wry and clever. No big solutions are achieved, but saving your younger self from choking, from making out with the wrong teen, and from various self-esteem missteps is presented in a charming and delightful manner.

Recommended! It's a quick read.

This post's theme word is skiamachy (n), "a mock fight or a fight with an imaginary enemy." Philosophists debate whether the metaphorical skiamachy with insecurity is too on-the-nose when represented as a slap-fight with one's childhood self, enabled by time travel.

Cryptid Club

Cryptid Club is a book collection of Sarah Andersen's series of comics about fictional/mythical creatures. The art style is cute but with a sarcastic twinge, and the humor leaves a lot of space for beats and reading between the lines (and glances) on the page. Overall this was a delight and a quick read, since it's a short comic series, and I loved it. Recommended.

Plus, the cover glows in the dark!

This post's theme word is peritext (n), "the material surrounding the main text of the book, such as covers, preface, bibliography, colophon, etc." The Cryptic Club peritext is delightful and includes an author-bio-style glossary in the back with pictures and descriptions of all starring cryptids.

Deadpool

I went to see Deadpool with no background knowledge of the comic books on which it was based. The trailers and billboards playing around Paris suggested that it would break the 4th wall.

They were accurate.

Spoilers below the break.

Alas! Edward Norton

Apparently, at some point in the past, Marvel figured out that they could get more mileage (money) from their fan base by recombining existing superheroes into a superhero gang. Thus did Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, and some other incidental characters included for franchise convenience, combine forces to become The Avengers in 1963. I am not a comic book aficionado, so now I willfully elide and ignore the vast, rich intervening history of Marvel fandom and the Avengers. And now, nearly fifty years later, this sad and wrung-out merchandising ploy is being resurrected as a live-action film by the unimaginative executives of today.

Thus do we arrive at The Avengers movie.

A universe in which the extremely scientific and engineering-centric Tony Stark coincides with the Norse god Thor who has magical hammer powers makes no meaningful, consistent sense. (Mjöllnir!) I continuously wondered throughout this trailer whether the super-science field would cancel the super-mythological field and render them both as pitifully over-muscled, emotionally immature men. Shouting at each other in a giant crater of their own inability to come to terms with life.

All this absurdity could be overlooked, but for one fact: Edward Norton is no longer the Hulk. I am appalled and disappointed; I enjoyed [mocking] Edward Norton-as-the-Hulk's origin movie, and Edward Norton is a favorite of mine. Now there's some other guy playing the Hulk, and he is frankly much less Edward-Norton-ish than I'd prefer.


This post's theme word is snite, "to blow your nose." I snite at you, you so-called Arthur King, you and all your silly reboots of franchise movies!

Happy Easter!

Real rabbits don't have ovipositors, although the Easter bunny, with his proclivities for walking like a human, chocolate, and hiding candy for children, has enough weird habits that maybe his species does have ovipositors.


This post's theme word: gravid, "in an advanced stage of pregnancy," although I've also seen it used to mean "in an egg-laying phase" when applied to insects. As in, "The gravid rabbit-like alien extended its slimy ovipositor into the helpless victim's abdominal cavity."
This post written like James Joyce.