My son and I are travelling with my brother and his family. I have taken the opportunity to read with my 8-year old niece, who has virtually no experience with super heroics, although a few years ago, I did read several trades of Tiny Titans to her.
Marvel’s jacket copy of The Immortal Hulk goes like this: “Horror has a name. You’d never notice the man. He doesn’t like to be noticed. He’s quiet. Calm. Never complains. If someone were to walk up and shoot him in the head… all he’d do is die. Until night falls. And someone else gets up again. The man’s name is Banner. The horror is The Immortal Hulk.”
Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk has had a lot of incarnations. His original incarnation by Lee and Kirby was a Jekyll and Hyde story with a scientist turning into a gray-skinned monster each night. They found that gray-skinned monster blended into the gray night-time scenes so the Hulk soon became green and more of a science fictional anti-superhero who fought high-science communist threats and briefly joined the Avengers.
I sometimes have trouble making my brain stop thinking. As a writer, it’s hard to read a book, story or comic or watch anything without having my “is this the way I would have done this?” or “what can I learn from this?” working in the background. This can be exhausting.
I’m in one of those periods now, so in the last couple of months, I watched the whole Logan’s Run TV series and a few episodes of the 1978 Battlestar Galactica for its kitsch, nostalgia and the mental time travel to my youth. I blogged a bit about 70s sci-fi TV here. But I still needed something more to listen to while driving and doing dishes.
I’ve been following webtoons.com on my phone’s app for a while and had Lore Olympus suggested to me many times because it is one of the most highly recommended. The thumbnail didn’t do much for me, but I recently decided to try it. The first episode is here. Oh my God…. It is so good!
In Lore Olympus writer/artist Rachel Smythe retells the Persephone-Hades story in the trappings of a modern urban fantasy. It is a full-on romance story, but also fully placed in the world of the gods and the nymphs and legends of ancient Greece, with cell phones, Fatesbook, cars and glitzy parties.
Nineteen-year old, over-protected Persephone is staying with Artemis while she starts university. They go to a party at Hera’s house, and only intend to stay for one drink, because Demeter, to protect her daughter, raised her in the mortal realm and Persephone is not used to any of the gods’ vast wealth. In her family, they make things.
I try to read a bit of everything. I’ve blogged about Webtoons.com before — it’s a massive (like thousands) webcomic hosting site in South Korea. I’ve mentioned Newman, Cyko-KO, maybe Elf and Warrior, but in the last couple of weeks I’ve burned through 190 episodes (each one is equivalent to 4-6 comic book pages) of a 260 episode series called Girls of the Wild’s.
It’s basically Harry Potter goes to a Korean Hogwarts, except instead of magic, it’s mixed martial arts, and instead of wizards, it’s a girls school. And now it’s co-ed for the first time, and a poor guy called Jaegu, who gets beat up and bullied a lot, and who has to raise his two kindergarten siblings because his mother abandoned them, is the first and only male student.
I sometimes get overwhelmed by all the things on Netflix that I don’t want to watch, and yet, when I’m alone, I like to watch a bit of TV while eating. So lately I’ve been pulling out some old 1970s sci-fi. I watched a few episodes of my Battlestar Galactica boxed set. And surprisingly, I’ve been enjoying Logan’s Run the TV series. And it’s made me think about the way the 1970s TV sci-fi aesthetic stuck together.
It’s more than just the computers that all look the same. The brightly-lit panels on everything ring futuristic to me, perhaps because I lived through the tail end of the 70s with an impressionable aesthetic palate. I’m curious — do you guys think that there’s a 1970s sci-fi TV “look and feel”?
One of the most fascinating crosses for me is when science fiction and religious faith hang out. Star Wars is deeper for the faith of the Jedi. Worlds like Altered Carbon are starker and more desolate with their utter materialism. One of my favorite mixes of science fiction and religion is Battlestar Galactica, both the original series with its angels, and the 2003 reimagining with its robotic religious zealots.
I hadn’t watched Battlestar Galactica in about half a dozen years, but as I make my way through the project of trying to watch some of the top drama on TV, I wasn’t surprised to find Battlestar Galactica on a New York Times list of top 20 dramas since the Sopranos and I decided to watch it again.
I just came back from watching Captain Marvel with my 14-year old son. He was super excited to see it. He hasn’t yet maxed out on superhero movies like his dad. That being said, I was also pretty hyped to see it, in part because Captain Marvel was one of the comics I first started collecting when I was eleven and twelve years old. Back then, I was reading the Mar-Vell version, but I also picked up some Claremont/Cockrum Ms. Marvel because of Captain Marvel and because Carol Danvers was a regular in the Uncanny X-Men at the time.
I’m not going to make a blanket statement that all wizards suck, or that low-level wizards suck, but my low-level wizard sucks. I’m just going to assume my experience applies to everyone.
My friends play a 5e D&D game and one of them persuaded me that if I role-played out-of-character, it would be valuable for my writing. I normally play fighter-types who are brave and at the front of things, and figured having to play a wizard would show me new things. Here’s what I imagined it would be like:
Spoiler. It has been a new experience and so far, it has mostly shown me how to miss on my attacks.
I think everyone’s to-be-read pile is always in danger of collapsing on them so that rescuers can only find cat-gnawed bones. For that reason, I listen via Audible and don’t have a cat.
But still, my to-be-read pile is huge and growing and I’d been wanting to read Fonda Lee’s Jade City for some time. It just won the Aurora and did quite well with Hugo and Nebula readers. Also how cool does a magical Asian Godfather story sound?
Lee has created the world of Janloon, what felt to me as a kind of magical Hong Kong, set sometime after cars, airplanes and phones, but before cell phones and computers. It’s a world of increasing modernity and one where ancient traditions (magical jade) come into conflict.
The Kaul family and the Ayt family are the two big mafia families that run Janloon through politicians and businesses. The people of Janloon are the only ones who can wear magical jade without having major toxicity/withdrawal/addiction problems. In the hands of a trained green-bone, jade can enhance perception, strength, speed, toughness, etc and the uneasy stalemate between the No Peak Clan (the Kauls) and the Mountain Clan (the Ayts) begins to unravel with the possibility of a drug called SN1 which allows foreigners to use jade.