Paper Moon

Yes yes yes, I know that everyone and their dog is posting a million "best of 2012" lists this week (including me), but I want to take a moment to highlight one best-of list in particular:

Robot 6's Favorite Comics of 2012

Six different comic reviewers with very, very different tastes list their favorites from last year. What's noteworthy about this "best-of" article is that each of the six reviewers list completely different titles... with the notable exception of Hawkeye and Bandette, which are BOTH listed on THREE of the six reviewer's lists, and along with Courtney Crumnin are the ONLY titles to appear on more than one reviewer's list (and Courtney Crumnin is only included on two of the six lists, not three).

I really don't think that I can come up with a better endorsement for those two series. Hawkeye and Bandette are really great. Y'all should definitely check them out.

Also the Robot 6 article reminded me that I was seriously remiss in not including Battlepug on my own "best-of" post from two days ago. Whoops.

ETA: The Onion's A.V. Club also listed Hawkeye, Bandette, and Courtney Crumnin as being among the best comics of the year. What I take away from this is that I REALLY need to get around to reading Courtney Crumnin.

Thing the first: If you aren't watching The Disney Channel's Gravity Falls, you should be watching it. It's gorgeously animated, genuinely funny, surprisingly self-aware, and it has an amazing musical soundtrack. It's definitely a show with that particular sense of humor that makes it feel like it belongs on Cartoon Network much moreso than it belongs on The Disney Channel. I mean, just look at this opening sequence:

Thing the second: Here are some more comics that are good!

The Legend of Bold Riley: Princess Rilavashana SanParite is one of the best adventurer-princess characters I've encountered in a long time, the artwork by Vanessa Gillings and Kelly McClellan is incredible, and this book overall is just so. damn. good. By the way, here's a free 55-page preview.

Ntombinde, the Girl Who Loved Danger: This comic is one of the rarest of the rare, a page-length weekly newspaper comic printed in independent weeklies across the United States. Fortunately, even if you don't have access any of the newspapers that print Ntombinde, you can still read the (uncolored) version of her weekly adventures at Sterling Clark's website, or you can buy her collected adventures in graphic novel format. I'm having a hard time finding where to buy the Ntombinde graphic novel online, but I bought my copy directly from Sterling Clark when I met him at DCCC, so if he or Studio S is appearing at any comic conventions in your area you should definitely check out his books.

Battlepug: This comic is exactly what it says on the tin, and it is glorious. It's clever, irreverent, a helluva a lot of fun, and beautifully illustrated by Mike Norton (whom you may remember as one of the best artists on Marvel's Runaways). Plus I think that this page just kind of speaks for itself. ETA: And Battlepug just won the 2012 Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic!! AWESOME!!

Monekybrain Comics is a new imprint that just launched with five amazing-looking titles, three of which have female protagonists, all of which you can check out extensive previews of here.

The Whole Story is a new comics website that lets you name your price to download beautiful DRM-free, high-quality PDF comics. You can find new comics by Ryan North (Adventure Time, Dinosaur Comics), Meredith Gran (Marceline and the Scream Queens), Katie Cook (Star Wars), Shaenon Garrity (Smithson), Ryan Estrada (Aki Alliance, Flight), David Hellman (Braid), Andrew Hussie (YES REALLY), and Nam Dong Yoon. In addition to about a dozen other talented artists and writers. So trust me when I say that this site is really, really worth checking out.

Speaking of indie comics! Love and Rockets is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary at Comic-Con this weekend. And if you've never read anything by the Hernandez brothers before, you are seriously missing out.

And now, our concluding link for this post, for all of you writers out there: Five Ways that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Can Make You a Better Writer.

Due to health problems and not being able to work earlier this month, I've been spending a lot of time catching up with old comics and trying out a few new ones. In particular I've been gorging myself on webcomics lately, and although I usually end up either underwhelmed by or outright disliking most of the webcomics that I try reading, there are a few that I fall head-over-heels in love with. So, here are some thoughts about some things that I'm reading right now, whether I've been reading them for years or have only recently discovered them, all of which I would recommend to the comic-inclined.

Namesake. Just starting reading this last week and have barely been able to put it down step away from the computer screen. A beautifully-drawn and fiercely feminist fantasy story about fulfilling roles in fairy tales and taking charge of your own destiny. And it does more to establish the heroine's complex and believable personality in the first six pages of Chapter 1 than most webcomics manage to do in an entire volume. I'm only pointing this out because that is definitely one of my number-one pet peeves in the entire "normal girl gets sucked into a strange world" genre of web comics: When the author doesn't establish anything about the heroine's personality before having her suddenly end up in the other world. Or even worse, when the author wastes time with page after page of scenes of the heroine doing "normal everyday stuff" in order to establish how normal she is but STILL forgets to let her show any hint of a personality trait. This comic is one of the worst offenders I've seen to date in that particular area. On the opposite end of the spectrum and as an example of Doing It Right, however, we have Namesake and also animeshen's delightful Wendy and Sully in Candlyland, which takes a succinct eight pages to give the reader a solid grasp on Wendy and Sully's personalities and how they interact with each other, and does so in a fun and interesting way.

Unsounded. This comic is about a young monkey-thief who can swashbuckle with her feet and who suffers from Black Star-like delusions of grandeur. If that isn't enough to of a selling point for you, there's also a mysterious and handsome zombie with a tragic past. And a magical mountain-shaped monster that befriends a blind boy and his assistance flame-monster. (Why have an assistance dog when you can have an assistance flame-monster?) Unsounded is immediately engrossing and tons of fun to read, even if it does suffer from some significant flaws - namely that the overcomplicated artwork can sometimes get visually confusing, and the story throws a lot of made-up terminology at the reader without really pausing for some more comprehensible world-building. But those are really my only complaints about this beautiful, beautiful comic.

Gunnerkrigg Court. I've been hearing nothing but good things about this comic since it began in 2005, but I never got around to actually starting to read it until earlier this year. I wish I hadn't waited so long. It is every bit as good as everybody says it is.

The Less than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal. Young man calls off his arranged marriage, comes out to his family, gets disowned, gets drunk, and wakes up the next morning with a *~quirky and free-spirited~* hottie frying eggs and singing in his kitchen. Oh, and apparently the two of them made a pact last night to drive across the country together. In the hands of a lesser writer this could have been every terrible gay-romance-for-straight-ladies cliche rolled up into a "wacky roadtrip" narrative. But somehow E.K. Weaver manages to infuse the story with actually believable characters, believable dialogue, and plenty of humor and warmth. Highly recommended.

Patchwork and Lace. The new-ish fantasy comic by furikku (who is also the creator of Reliquary). A pair of lady monster-hunters, a fantasmagoric set-up, and an intriguing fantasy world. Need I say more.

Oglaf. You may have heard of this one as "that epic fantasy porn comic that's actually really, really funny." A rare example of comedy porn that actually succeeds at being whip-smart and hilarious, while embracing a freewheeling variety of straight, gay, lesbian, vanilla, and kinky characters.

The Non-Adventures of Wonderella. Superhero parody comics come and go, but this one remains one of my absolute favorites and definitely the funniest.

X-Men canon: Keeping up with Astonishing X-Men, Exiled, Generation Hope, New Mutants, Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, and Wolverine & the X-Men. I dropped X-Factor a while back after sticking with it for far too long. And I just can't get into X-Force no matter how much I love Laura. But with the notable exceptions of a) all of X-Factor, no seriously all of it and b) Forge's epic character derail in Astonishing, I have to say: I LOVE the current X-Men canon, in a way that I haven't really loved the X-books since the early 2000s. I love all of the New Mutants story lines. I love Hope and all of the 5th-generation X-Men. I love Logan's sixty-year character arc finally coming full circle. I love Scott and Emma. I love Rogue so goddamn much. I love Magneto's redemption arc. Everything about the X-Men universe is so much fun to read right now. I think that the overall tone of the X-books has finally settled on a comfortable level of danger/angst/darkness without descending too far into the boring-ass depths of grimdarkness, which is a MUCH needed improvement after the epicly stupid, epicly boring, and pointlessly grimdark mess that was Messiah Complex and all of its aftermath.

Buffy Season 9. Much, much, much better than Season 8 so far. Much better. (Although I will forever and always love the Faith/Giles story arc from the beginning of Season 8. Best and arguably the only solidly good part of that entire series, if you ask me.)

Homestuck. "There's not a lot of style to invisibility. Primarily because nobody gets to see how damn smooth you're being." Homestuck, for all of its overhype and its failures and its flaws, is still just a goddamn delight to read with every update.

And as for DC Comics, well... I am taking a break from DC Comics for a while. Might try to reconnect with the Batfamily sometime later, but I don't know. I loved everything that Grant Morrison built up with the "death" of Bruce Wayne and the birth of Batman Inc, and I'm still bitter about the New 52 just wiping all of those years of character development and storyline setup right out of the DC Universe.

Yup, that's how you know that I'm a mainstream comics fan: Still bitter about an storyline-breaking editorial mandate from over a year ago. Still bitter.

And as for what's upcoming that I'm the most looking forward to: It's the Adventure Time spin-off comic about Princess Bubblegum joining Marceline's band. Hell. Fucking. Yes.

The Anime/Manga/Manwha/Manhua Drabblefest is still going on! Come drabble with us!

The 2012 Not Prime Time Fic Festival is open for signups.

The Female Character Trope Fest is open for fills, too!

There is also a Transfic Mini Fest, a Podfic Meme, and a Reverse Remix Meme for all of your ficcing needs.

Filed under "Awesome Websites that Time Forgot": The Redwall Kitchen is still online. And there is a recipe for real honest-to-goodness homemade dandelion wine in there. Awesome.

Meanwhile, Atsushi Ohkubo.

Also, your Soul Eater Moment of Zen: Here is the entire Soul Eater cast made of pipe cleaners. Along with many other anime characters.

My Little Pony and Wakfu have already done a lot to convince me that Flash animation can not only be, you know, actually good, but downright beautiful if done well. And then this freakin' episode came along and just blew all of my assumptions about the limitations of Flash animation right out of the goddamn water.

The animation! The luscious background art! The background ponies! The costumes! The character designs! The facial expressions! The cinematography in the musical numbers, the fight scenes, even the scene where Twilight is sitting at that cafe table and venting to all her friends!

Just freakin' everything about this episode was perfect. The new characters were great. Shining Armor was such an adorkable dudebro and Cadence was so courageous and awesome. The villains were straight-up nightmare fuel of the type that I haven't seen since some of the more phantasmagoric episodes of the original MLP series. And oh my god not just the epic songs but even the background music was fantastic. (asdfghjkl;asdfghjkl; that music that plays when Shining Armor and Cadence cast their spell!!!!) Everything was fantastic, right down to the sounds effects that the Changeling Queen's wings made when she flapped them and that her hooves made when she walked.

There's just so much amazing attention to detail paid to every single frame of animation in this episode, it blows me away. And the music was so good. I am so completely in love with the key changes in "This Day Aria" I could listen to it all day long. And the episode managed to balance its tone pretty evenly between the epic fantasy elements and the comedy elements. Which, to be honest, this new version of MLP always does consistently well - thank goodness it never makes the mistake that the original series did of taking itself too seriously, because then of course it would immediately become completely ridiculous - but I was especially happy that the big Twilight and Company vs. Changeling Swarm Kung-Fu Blowout turned badass funny very quickly. Because if it hadn't been hilarious it would have been hard to take any of it seriously at all, as paradoxical as that may seem.

HERE HAVE SOME SONGS BECAUSE THEY ARE AWESOME (ALSO SPOILERS but i kind of doubt that anybody reading this actually cares):



ETA: Rolling Stone covers My Little Pony music. I love how the reporter actually asks Daniel Ingram if he's using big words in the songs in order to pander to an older male demographic, and Ingram responds "No, I never forget about the original demographic of our show, which is six-year-old girls. Just because it's for kids... I don't think that influences me in terms of how sophisticated I want to make the music."

Oh Daniel Ingram I heart you so much for that response. So freakin' much. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love this show for never talking down to its audience, and I love the creators for refusing to buy into the idea that something for little girls can't be sophisticated and multilayered and intelligent, and I really wish that a certain segment of the Brony fandom would get on board with that idea and stop trying to claim that anything intelligent or complex about the show is automatically evidence of pandering to them because obviously big words and smart jokes are always intended for an adult male audience (*eyeroll*).

I will go to bed early tonight and be sober for the UK/Louisville game tomorrow. I will go to bed early tonight and be sober for the UK/Louisville game tomorrow. I will go to bed early tonight and be sober for the UK/Louisville game tomorrow DAMMIT.

So here is some nerdy linkspam!

terajk is hosting a People with Disabilities Being Awesome commentfic fest!

sqbr has some recommendations for fanworks about disabled characters.

Apropos of nothing and because (tragically!) it did not make sqbr's list, "Clothes We Abandoned in the Closet" is a beautiful Tavros/Vriska fic. It's humanstuck!AU but don't let that put you off because it is awesome.

Speaking of disability and sex and love and all that stuff! Random Curiousity has a pretty thorough review of Katawa Shoujo that I mostly agree with. But I do wish that Zaniba hadn't been so quick to declare that "this is not a visual novel for those with a fetish," as that is definitely how it began, and the reaction all over the internet has shown that those with a certain set of particular fetishes are flocking to the game. And yet despite that, the game itself has grown into something so much better that has so much more to offer to such a wider audience than just the disability fetishists. This is a visual novel for those with a fetish, and it's pretty disingenuous to claim that it's not, but it's also a visual novel for the rest of us as well.

Completely unrelated! I am ridiculously excited for the Lupin III ALL FUJIKO ALL THE TIME TV series that starts next week, even if I'm still not entirely sold on the hyper-stylized animation and character designs. Oh well. It's Lupin III and it's Fujiko and there's no way that this can be anything but awesome.

Also, this week I finally caved in and bought myself a gorgeous 27" Dell monitor, which is something that I've wanted for a looooong time, and I'm still feeling a little bit of leftover happiness buzz from being able to finally write the check for the darn thing. YAY! And it has a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels so y'all can look forward to some insanely high-resolution Soul Eater screensaver rips coming next week.

1. Melinda Beasi breaks down Apple's continuing censorship of LGBTQ content on iPad apps, and makes some eye-opening comparisons to (hetero)sexual content that Apple allows to be published uncensored.

2. Google's new privacy policy, what it means for you, and what you can do to protect your information. Concise, useful, and a must-read, especially with all of the misinformation about Google's new privacy policy floating around the web (hi Tumblr).

3. Attention language geeks! The always-excellent Sanskrit Literature Blog is compiling a list of Sanskrit newspapers and periodicals. The majority of these are of the dead tree variety that those of us living outside of India aren't going to have much access to, but some of them are digital. For example, Sanskrit Daily is exactly that - a daily Sanskrit news flier - that's available for free online. I haven't finished exploring the entire list of links and publications that have been compiled so far, but there are some really awesome resources here.

4. Yusuke Murata made an amazing 3D paper comic that he posted on his Twitter account. The linked post also has information about where you can find an English translation.

5. These preview images from the Marvel Super Hero Squad trading card game are amazing. Especially the one where Thor's "true power" is the ability to summon a rainbow-colored unicorn. And a very literal interpretation of Captain America's catch phrase. And the fact that "Group Hug" is an actual card. Everything about this game is going to be glorious.

6. Calling all artists: Soul Eater fanbook project! Soul Eater fanbook project! 'Nuff said.

7. And inspired by a conversation on Tumblr last night: If y'all liked Soul Eater because it's shounen fighting series with badass female leads who are also feminine because femininity is in no way shape or form a weak/bad trait that prevents a female lead from being a badass mofo... Then you can hardly go wrong with Kekkaishi or Fairy Tail, both of which are currently available in their entirety for free on Hulu.com. (Those of you living outside the US/Canada will probably need to do some proxy browsing to access Hulu, though.) Standard disclaimer: Neither series is without its flaws when it comes to sexism and Fairy Tail in particular has its share of oh for fuck's sake! fanservice. But then again the same is definitely true for Soul Eater, yet I'd still recommend any of these three series to anybody who wants to watch shounen anime with badass ladies who are actually badass without falling into the standard shounen traps of being a) characters who are said to be badass but then end up having to be saved by the male heroes all the time or b) super-masculine ladies who refuse to show any signs of femininity because everybody knows that feminine traits are bad and they make a person weak and helpless (*eyeroll*). Anywhoo, Kekkaishi's Tokine and Fairy Tail's Lucy are definitely tied with Maka Albarn for being some of the most awesome shounen heroines to come along in the past decade (in my humble opinion). So in case any Soul Eater fans reading this haven't checked out Kekkaishi or Fairy Tail yet, you definitely should give them a try.

Ice-T's reaction shot is the best part of the video.

Other things:

1. Vera Brosgol's dialogue-less, 35-page comic "What, were you raised by wolves?" is brutal and beautiful and will rip your heart out. Hat-tip to slakemoths for the link.

2. Holy shit these background moments in this week's MLP episode. I completely missed both the Twist drama and the fact that the elderly pony that Sweetie Bell sang about was at a funeral.

3. The Art of Animation (NSFW) is the best thing on Tumblr, possibly one of the best things on the internet period. The blog is also useful as ammunition for dispelling the myth that Asian artists only create anime/manga-styled works.

4. Well, I dunno why people are coming here instead of watching shibusen for Soul Eater news, but since some of y'all seem to have missed this: Not! chapter 11 is now available on the YenPress website. Yes it was released the same day that it was on Japan, yes there is a message from Ohkubo to US readers and a cute bonus drawing of Tsugumi in this month's chapter, and yes this month's chapter is awesome. Also Ohkubo may or may not have changed the spelling of Anya's name again, I dunno but when I get my copy of GanGan tomorrow I'll know for sure. But in the meantime, everyone who wants Soul Eater news should join or at least watch shibusen. There's even an RSS feed for all of your syndication needs!

5. Meanwhile, over at MTVGeek, Brigid Alverson interviewed Kurt Hassler about Soul Eater, Soul Eater Not!, and working with Square Enix Japan on making the simultaneous release of Not! happen. It's a interesting read, but for me the best part is when Hassler actually starts describing Not!'s relationship to Soul Eater and it's so beautifully clear that he GETS exactly what's appealing about both series and how they're different and why Ohkubo is a kick-ass artist. He also gets exactly what consumers want, he really gets it:

Hassler said he, and other publishers, know what people want: "They want it quicker, digitally, with no territory restrictions," he said. "We know all this, but knowing it and making it happen are two different things."

There's also some interesting information about why Yen+ isn't available on the iPad yet, even though Yen Press's other books are. In short: Holy app infrastructure technical limitations, Batman, this shit isn't as easy as it looks!

Quoted from ladiesmakingcomics:

I’m sorry, I have to do this, because it seems like everywhere I turn people are going “Did you hear the Supreme Court took some stuff out of the public domain and put it back under copyright??? CORPORATIONS WILL SOON OWN ALL OF CULTURE ARGLEBARGLE!!”

That is not what has happened.

The Supreme Court has interpreted an international copyright treaty to enforce copyright on foreign works that are still under copyright in their own countries, but that were in the public domain in the U.S. only due to the U.S.’s own jumbled copyright history.

Is there a risk of U.S. works being taken out of the public domain? Yes, but only by an act of Congress—which is not very likely. I know everyone is worried about SOPA and PIPA and ACTA and think that every aspect of free expression is under attack, but unlike Internet law, copyright law has about 225 years of precedent in the U.S. and even further back in English law from which the American legal system descends. The only direct effect I can see this case having on any American works is probably going to be Margaret Mitchell’s estate running to Australia to get Gone With the Wind put back under copyright there.

Here’s the thing— those media conglomerates that poured millions into SOPA/PIPA/ACTA? They have little interest in touching the current public domain. All those Sherlock Holmes movies and TV shows, all those Jane Austen adaptations, all those high school comedies based on Shakespeare that they make means that they benefit from the public domain as much as anyone.

So, stay vigilant about future copyright legislation, but the Supreme Court made a good decision in this case.

TL;DR version: Stop freaking out about Golan v. Holder. Take action to stop ACTA instead.

And asdfghjkl;asdfghjkl; the misleading reporting about Golan v. Holder from major news outlets that should know better has been driving me up the wall.