Recent media
Dec. 2nd, 2015 03:23 pmHe-man, recent comic
Randomly from library, yay library. This seems to be a recent reinterpretation which fleshes out the characters and worldbuilding, seeming to be aimed at people who read/watched he-man as children. Adam, a humble woodcutter, is troubled by dreams of being He-Man, and fighting evil overlord Skeletor, and gets drawn into world-wide events.
I like the way it seems consistent with the version I remember, but fleshes it out so the characters seem more like actual characters. I don't like the inclusion of some of the over-sexualised costumes and stereotypical slave-dealing-ness for people living in deserts :(
Death Vigil, comic
This was great fun. Look at the front cover of the collected edition: https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/death-vigil Bernadette is not death, but is, for reasons lost in time, loosely inspired by death, or Valkyries, or something, rescuing people with certain aptitudes from the moment of death to join a semi-corporal organisation devoted to defeating various necromancers and the lovecraftian horrors influencing them.
What I love is, the way she's just slightly awkward about it. She always plays the role of the leader, but her expression is always just a little bit "Who, me?" And some fun other characters, like the raven who turns into a tyranosaurus, and the new woman who quickly learns how to use her portal-creating power offensively, and the digger who's the first viewpoint character and mostly hits stuff, and the little girl who accidentally fused with a lovecraftian horror but is on the side of the good guys, and her dad's feud with Bernie.
I read the first collected edition, and apparently it's cancelled soon after that. But people recommended Sunstone also by Stjepan Sejic (a lesbian BDSM relationship comic iirc) so I should probably try that.
SevenEves, novel
Neal Stephenson. Fairly readable, good ideas about near-future space-colonisation, which is something I've felt the lack of in my life for a while.
Undertones of "Hard science good, social science bad".
Makes a creditable attempt to have characters. I didn't find any of them as memorable as the characters from Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon or Baroque Cycle (where even if you didn't like the characterisation, I at least found it memorable). But it had a twenty+ characters I could actually describe the difference between, which is a good start. And makes a reasonable-but-not-perfect attempt to have characters who just happen to be female without that being the defining feature of their character.
Shadow Hero, comic
After enjoying severla of Gene Luen Yang's other books, I bought several of his older ones. Shadow Hero is the re-imagined backstory for a golden-age comics hero, the Green Turtle, who did generally super-heroic things, but was by an Asian-American creator, and invariably hid his face in almost every panel. It's speculated the creator had hoped to make him Asian-American, but had been rebuffed, but that he still thought of him that way. Shadow Hero makes up a very touching story showing how a young Chinese-American man blunders into becoming the Green Turtle.
Randomly from library, yay library. This seems to be a recent reinterpretation which fleshes out the characters and worldbuilding, seeming to be aimed at people who read/watched he-man as children. Adam, a humble woodcutter, is troubled by dreams of being He-Man, and fighting evil overlord Skeletor, and gets drawn into world-wide events.
I like the way it seems consistent with the version I remember, but fleshes it out so the characters seem more like actual characters. I don't like the inclusion of some of the over-sexualised costumes and stereotypical slave-dealing-ness for people living in deserts :(
Death Vigil, comic
This was great fun. Look at the front cover of the collected edition: https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/death-vigil Bernadette is not death, but is, for reasons lost in time, loosely inspired by death, or Valkyries, or something, rescuing people with certain aptitudes from the moment of death to join a semi-corporal organisation devoted to defeating various necromancers and the lovecraftian horrors influencing them.
What I love is, the way she's just slightly awkward about it. She always plays the role of the leader, but her expression is always just a little bit "Who, me?" And some fun other characters, like the raven who turns into a tyranosaurus, and the new woman who quickly learns how to use her portal-creating power offensively, and the digger who's the first viewpoint character and mostly hits stuff, and the little girl who accidentally fused with a lovecraftian horror but is on the side of the good guys, and her dad's feud with Bernie.
I read the first collected edition, and apparently it's cancelled soon after that. But people recommended Sunstone also by Stjepan Sejic (a lesbian BDSM relationship comic iirc) so I should probably try that.
SevenEves, novel
Neal Stephenson. Fairly readable, good ideas about near-future space-colonisation, which is something I've felt the lack of in my life for a while.
Undertones of "Hard science good, social science bad".
Makes a creditable attempt to have characters. I didn't find any of them as memorable as the characters from Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon or Baroque Cycle (where even if you didn't like the characterisation, I at least found it memorable). But it had a twenty+ characters I could actually describe the difference between, which is a good start. And makes a reasonable-but-not-perfect attempt to have characters who just happen to be female without that being the defining feature of their character.
Shadow Hero, comic
After enjoying severla of Gene Luen Yang's other books, I bought several of his older ones. Shadow Hero is the re-imagined backstory for a golden-age comics hero, the Green Turtle, who did generally super-heroic things, but was by an Asian-American creator, and invariably hid his face in almost every panel. It's speculated the creator had hoped to make him Asian-American, but had been rebuffed, but that he still thought of him that way. Shadow Hero makes up a very touching story showing how a young Chinese-American man blunders into becoming the Green Turtle.