melannen | (no subject)

I am back from con.txt! Actually I have been back for awhile but I only now have time to think again.

con.txt was super fun! I gave in and am trying discord via the new con.txt discord! I am, indeed, obsessively backreading every single channel already, just like the reason I had to quit slack, so we will see how long I last. (If you are a person who-has-attended-or-wishes-they-had-attended-con.txt and would like to be invited to the con.txt discord, I might be able to figure out how to invite you?)

I should do a con report, but instead I think I will hang onto my panel schedule and slowly dole out meta posts based on things discussed in the panels I attended. That sounds more... manageable.

First, an easy one: the comics recs panel, which was a DIY led by

zvi! (It was really good to see

zvi, among other people, again after drifting to different corners of the internet, which was kind of a general theme of the con this year.)

Here is a list of comics that were rec'd. I have starred the ones I have read at least some of and will happily talk about! Maybe I will even backfill this entry with actual info and links for them, who knows!

*Bitch Planet
Lazarus
Fence
*Saga
*Monstress
Slam!
Jem & the Holograms
*Sex Criminals
INSEXTS
*Rock Candy Mountain
*Princeless/Raven the Pirate Princess
The Unstoppable WASP
*The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl
Gotham City Garage
DC Bombshells/Bombshells United
Warning Label
Love and Capes
*Shirtless Bearfighter
Letters for Lucardo
*The Witch Boy
The Prince & The Dressmaker
Yes, Roya
*One Punch Man
Moonstruck
*Angela
Upcoming GWW Wonder Woman
Clean Room
The Movement
*Archie reboot continuity
*Kaijumax
*Golden Kamuy
Mech Cadet Yu
Power Ballad
*Taproot
*Space Battle Lunchtime
*Brave Chef Brianna
*Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur
*Ultimate Spider-Man (Miles Morales?)
*Ms. Marvel
*Spider-Gwen
All-New Wolverine
Castle Waiting
*Giant Days
*Kill Six Billion Demons
Leaving Megalopolis
Kelly Thompson's A-Force
*Hawkeye
*Faith
Shuri
Blackbird
*Check Please!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Glad you had a good time!

Sorry you couldn't make it!

666

???

I am curious about your thoughts on Sex Criminals.

I only read up through I think... the second trade? The art was good and the characterization and superpowers were cool! But the "plot" (such as it exists) was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how public libraries work and what public librarians do, and this annoyed me enough that I haven't made a serious effort to track down any more of it. :P (I realize that the plot was not the point! But no public librarian is going to go "oh, well, we're going to have to lose the building, but at least I saved the books." Books are easy to get! We have to turn people with books away! Constantly!

Edited 2018-08-03 00:30 (UTC)

I'd be interested to know what you thought about One Punch Man! I read all of it just recently (well, like a year or so ago now) and am still following the new installments. I have sort of a love-hate relationship with it (especially regarding one character who I really wish didn't exist) but I also really love the domestic-cohabitation buddy-comedy aspects and the various ways in which it's handling and subverting assorted shounen manga cliches.

That is about where I am! I like a lot of aspects of it, and I love the cliche subversion (of shounen manga, but also kaiju movies and western superheroes and probably some other Japaneses stuff I don't have the context for) and also Saitama is forever on my list of "characters I probably empathize with too hard" alongside Murderbot, but there's also bits I wish didn't exist.

And I'm currently experiencing the thing I often do with shonen manga, where I love the first eight or ten volumes of setup and fun, and then it turns into interminable. fights. that. last. three. volumes. and. nothing. happens., and that's kind of where it is right now. I don't know if they're trying to parody that pacing too, but if so they've missed the mark and come back around to boring. (I think it probably has more to do with meeting Shounen Jump's publication deadlines than anything, tbh.)

I love the first eight or ten volumes of setup and fun, and then it turns into interminable. fights. that. last. three. volumes. and. nothing. happens., and that's kind of where it is right now. I don't know if they're trying to parody that pacing too, but if so they've missed the mark and come back around to boring

Haha, yeah, agreed. The frustrating thing is that in the early volumes they did a pretty good job of subverting the expectation of interminable shounen fights in various clever ways, but increasingly they've started playing it straight and the current arc feels like it's been going on for approximately 40 years. I am looking forward to seeing what happens when Genos gets back into the scrum again -- his fights are often the high point of the fight arcs for me -- but I also think it's a hilarious commentary on the endlessness of shounen fight sequences that one of the characters got the absolute hell bashed out of him, went off to get fixed, got fixed, came back to fight again, and the fight is (basically) STILL GOING ON. (I mean, there's been some changes of scene and a rotating cast of characters, but essentially, it's the same fight.)

(I think it probably has more to do with meeting Shounen Jump's publication deadlines than anything, tbh.)

Oh, and I just got to thinking about this ... I don't think it has deadlines. It's a webcomic. As a matter of fact, I've never followed a manga that had quite as weird a publication history as this one does.

It started out as an independent webcomic. The art, though ... the guy can't really draw. It's basically stick figures.

At some point it got picked up by, not Shounen Jump, but a seinen manga magazine that wanted it for their online edition. They gave the writer dude an actual artist to work with, a fairly big-name guy, and the current run of the comic is a redo of the webcomic from the beginning, fleshing it out a lot (we're still not caught up with the original, but I think the story is diverging more and more, as the writer takes the opportunity to rewrite a bunch of stuff). The artist livestreams the chapters as he works on them, and they go live on the website immediately after he finishes (and not having the publication turnaround is downright weird; I've been kinda-sorta following this process on Tumblr, and you can have fresh spoiler images come out from the livestream and the very next day the chapter is up on the official website). But since the chapters are wildly variable in length, there's really no way to know for sure when one is going to be out ... well, except by stalking the tags on Tumblr, which is what I've generally been doing when I get in the mood to catch up on it.

Huh! See I've been following it via the Viz tankobon (and it is serialized in the Viz Shonen Jump). I knew about the original webcomic but from this end the redraw reads like a standard Viz-packaged Shonen manga, at least format-wise.

It was so great to see you face-to-face again.