Proof DC pays attention to complaining fans...

...and tries to get money off of them without giving them exactly what they want. From the January Solicits:

JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL HC
Written by Keith Giffen & J.M. DeMatteis
Cover by Maguire & Austin
Art by Kevin Maguire, Terry Austin and Al Gordon
A new hardcover collecting the classic JUSTICE LEAGUE #1-6 and JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL #7 from the late 1980s! Can an unlikely new Justice League line-up work as a unit to stop terrorists at the U.N., a brigade of Rocket Reds, the Royal Flush Gang, and other threats — or will they succumb to in-fighting and bad jokes?
Advance-solicited; in stores March 12 • FC, 192 pg, $24.99 US

A hardcover.

As a Green Lantern fan who bought so many Hal Jordan flashback stories, this really made me laugh. The editors may change, but the business never actually does.

(Thanks for catching this one Matt.)

Recommended Reading

Adventures in Lame analysis on the problems of introducing a female geek and a male beauty to the Beauty and the Geek reality show.

Awww...

I like this cartoon's cute little Hal. (Thanks, Zuke)

See, we're not so crazy after all! (More Dark is Rising stuff)

As a fan, I've had a lot of people tell me "the movie doesn't have to be just like the book!" and that I'm overreacting when they change something stupid and it annoys me. Now, personally I think I'm pretty relaxed when it comes to movie changes I don't think Superman: Doomsday butchered the plot of a graphic novel, but rather told a lovely alternate version of that story. Same for the DCU animated series from the past ten or fifteen years, the last two X-men cartoons, and the Batman Begins. (X-3, on the other hand, was like someone took a jackhammer to the X-Men mythos, but I digress). Change can be good in a good movie.

Still, I get "You're overreacting" a lot when I complain about a Hollywoodized property.

Its not often I see anything along the lines of "Maybe you're not being that melodramatic." Today I saw something like that:

However, when properly processing the aforementioned list of changes, it does seem like director David Cunningham and writer John Hodge stepped over the line. I can see the justification for a large number of the modifications (which mostly seemed geared towards increasing conflict and tension), but in total it's a pretty dramatic reinvention of the story. For one thing, instead of learning about his powers by magically absorbing the content of an ancient text, our young hero learns about "the light and the dark" by Googling it. For real.

(Googling, good god.)

Okay, so the reviewer isn't completely on our side, but she changed her mind about making fun of us. That's better than I (dyed-in-the-wool Green Lantern fan that I am) usually see. She says after that she doesn't fully empathize, but she's asking for people to share the traumatic destruction of their childhood favorites as they moved from book to film. Go share.

And as long as I'm sharing Seeker reviews, these guys are pretty mean to the movie.

Countdown 29

Oh thank you. That character has been treading on my nerves since he was introduced.

Now, can anyone tell me what the fucking point of his existence was?

Green Lantern #24 Spoilers

Dear Geoff Johns,

Its time to talk. You have a serious problem. You need help with your dialogue.

Okay, maybe your word processor deleted a few lines in that Kyle-Hal scene. (And in that exchange between Parallax and John, because John's line about staying black came out of nowhere.) But there's not excuse for Kyle's words on the last panel. I know what you intended, it didn't work.

Also, work on your timing. Just because we all know to expect several issues of action that amounts to twiddling your thumbs and then an issue where everything happens at once (well, everything happens one panel after another, but he always packs more in the issue right before the resolution than in the past year of the series, and things seem to move too fast).

Bad stuff out of the way, I liked this issue. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want Kyle free without any help, but I think the way it unfolds works nicely.

I can't express how happy I am you had Hal point out that he had help from the fucking Spectre. I was beginning to think you retconned that out, and it would be annoying. Now, I'm going to go ahead and assume Kyle's stronger since Hal needed an entity of Biblical power, the embodied wrath of God, to get him loose and Kyle just needed a pep talk.

I'm also a little annoyed that Guy was so quick with those construct shorts, but we can't have everything we hope for. I'm going to lose money on the lack of a scar, but we have two months for aftermath stories and there's a chance that Reis missed it.

Thank you for turning Kyle back to a regular Green Lantern, and thank whoever designed that new costume. (except the mask -- what is it about Kyle and masks?) I hope it has a zipper. It looks like the top is a zip-up jacket and I think it would be cool to have him standing around with the coat part unzipped and a Green Lantern T-shirt.

I look forward to the next installment.

"We never said that bad bad thing!"

Deny, deny, deny...

Hello,
Thank you for your email. The claims being made on blogs regarding Mr. Robinov, Warner Bros. and female casting decisions are untrue. Our 2008 film slate, which includes at least three motion pictures with female leads and casts, underscores our commitment to telling good stories regardless of gender.
Thank you,
Warner Bros. Customer Service

I hope they're not counting Wonder Woman, because I've seen that slated to be released in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007...

And I don't know how many movies total Warner Bros puts out per year, but three movies with women would be understandable if they only had five-seven films planned at this point. I mean, they do realize we are half the population, right? So logically, half the movies should represent us.

Also doesn't say what genre those movies are, so they could be two romantic comedies and a slasher flick while they have five ideas for action and scifi thrillers starring men right next to them which still means they're doing a shityy job but hey, three whole movies of indeterminate genre with women in them. One or two of them may actually reach theaters!

This one'll be quick because I'm short on time.

Bellatrys has been puzzling over an X-Men cover for the last couple of days, trying to figure out what makes a feminine pose and costume and what makes a masculine one. Meanwhile, and between her and Willow they've figured out precisely what's wrong with some of these cheesecake covers. First, take a look at the original cover, and the three remixes Bellatrys made. Now Willow's comment on the Xena one:

Personally I'm very surprised that my first thought on the Xena one was get up. The spine's the same, the ass up is the same - though it's covered. Maybe it has something to do with Xeam = Strength to me.

But I don't find it gratuitous. I just go "Xena Get Up!" and worry about the bad guys and who was strong enough to do that to her.

Look at Conan and Storm again. The most prominent part of each picture is the exposed left buttcheek, there's also a good central view of her exposed back and a little bit of the side of her breast. The first thing you notice in the picture is the exposed flesh and that sets the tone of the whole image.

With Xena, her plain leather skirt covers her butt (it falls just perfectly to) and her breasts are fully covered, and the what stands out is her armor, not her flesh.

Superman is drawn the way his costume normally is, covered up with a shiny uniform. Not particularly provocative.

Every part of a piece of art is important, because the artist is trying to set up an overall mood. Every line in the drawing needs to support that mood somehow. A piece of superhero art is supposed to evoke a sense of heroism, even when the character is flat on their face. You are supposed to look at it and be impressed with what knocked them down, and ready to see them stand up in the next panel. That's what a cover image should be. Its supposed to make you want to pick up the book and look inside to see who they're fighting and how they kick the bad guy's ass after being thrown so badly.

When an artist focuses too much on making the subject of the piece look sexy, as Larocca (arguably) did with Storm and Bellatrys did (purposefully) with Conan by put so much attention on bare flesh, they destroy that. If the viewer's eye is first draw to a titallating image of a character's butt and thigh, you've lost the chance to make them worried about anything other sex. The viewer is not thinking about how the character got to be face-down on the ground, the viewer is focusing on the character's butt. The viewer is not anticipating that this character will crawl to their feet and punch the bad guy in the face, the viewer is thinking about the possibility of even more exposed flesh. Its not a matter of femininity or masculinity so much as sexualization period here.

This is one of those points that subjective, some people might not think that Storm in particular is a distracting amount of skin (comparatively, it doesn't seem like a lot except that her butt is the focal point of the cover) and its certainly not the worst cheesecake I've ever seen but its a good example of an artist slipping over the line and losing the desired effect. Its not just that its unnecessary, it is actually harming the overall image by screwing with the artist-viewer communication. If you go out of your way to draw cheesecake you lose a lot of the drama superhero comics are supposed to give us. Pinups are one thing, a cover scene like this is another. (Interior artwork is the worst time to be cheesecakey at all, because then you are interrupting the story itself by distracting the reader, but that's another complaint entirely.) The cover is supposed to make me want to buy the book. I'm supposed to look at that on the rack, get worried about what they'll do with Storm (granted that image makes me worry about how they're handling Storm but not in a way that makes me want to see what they're doing to her) so that I'll pick it up to see who tossed her and how she gets back on her feet.

The bottom line is that in a visual medium too much sexy can hurt the story. Artists need to be more thoughtful about what they put in an image.

Ahh, here we go.

ETA #2: Email form (Thank you, FSF Blog commenter who is smarter than I am)

ETA: Dave suggested this one:

Alan Horn, President, Warner Bros Entertainment
4000 Warner Blvd.
Burbank, CA 91522

I looked all over the Warner Bros studio site last night, but my searches are being sabotaged with references to the movie Contact so I couldn't find an address, email or phone number.

Today I tried the parent company. I'm not sure what names specifically to address it to.

Time Warner Inc.
One Time Warner Center
New York, NY10019-8016
Phone 212.4848000

And Warner Bros Entertainment on the Time-Warner site turns up this:

Susan Fleishman
Phone 818.954.1919

Corporate Communications Office
Phone 818.954.7304

If anyone is better investigator, please tell me what you turn up.

Addendum: We all know how this will play out.

Last post I was irritated but not willing to commit to my irritation.

I'm willing to commit to being pissed off now, and not because this has been confirmed.

I'm willing to commit to being pissed off because tomorrow the business week starts and we'll see Warner Bros. PR react to this. They will issue a statement that no such thing was said, and the three anonymous producers who "confirmed" the story are not likely to pop out of nowhere and contradict that. There will be nothing written anywhere that states this is the policy, because we all know how the world works. Nobody needs to write sexism into the rules (nobody needs to voice it either, so there's still a good possibility he never actually said it), the boy's club all act on it anyway. So, WB will get to play the victim of "baseless allegations of sexism" and nothing will change.

Which means we'll still see little to no attention given to action movies with female leads.

We'll see almost no female superhero movies, except for the sort that emphasize looking down the main character's spandex without a thought for quality.

Wonder Woman will still be consigned to Development Tartarus.

See, Mickle has a point in her comment. We all know that's their line of thinking. We all know every time a female-led action film doesn't do very well they lump the blame on the fact that it was led by a woman and become that much less likely to make a female-led action film. We know they judge actresses for bust size and low bodyfat rather than muscles and presence when casting female superheroes. We've seen it, its the behavior pattern, we all know how the fucking industry works.

Then we get this vague rumor of a comment that we've heard a million times, only now its attributed to a name so we can finally point and say "Gotcha!" and now we talk boycott and letter campaign and tomorrow they're going to deny the whole fucking thing and play everyone tht's mad up as a bad guy.

Maybe we'll get lucky, maybe they'll say he said it and apologize. You think he'll be sacked? Maybe. Then some other guy'll take over and enforce the same fucking policy and just not say anything about it.

Fuck that, we need progress not apologies. Its not good enough they won't say this shit, we need them to stop acting on this shit and in order to do that we need to convince them to stop thinking this shit.

Well, fuck that. You want to confront Robinov or one of his idiot colleagues? Chuck the "You said a bad bad thing" shit out the window. Confront him with the half-assed job they did with Catwoman. Confront him with the shitty ratio of female-led action movies to male led action movies and then when he says that female-led action movies don't sell confront him with the shitty effort put towards those female-led action movies and how male-led action movies with shitty effort put into them don't succeed either, and that more male-led action movies flop than female-led action moves anyway -- because there's just more of them!!

You want a boycott of Warner Bros? Do it with an aim. To hell with that stupid statement! They'll apologize at best and deny it at worst and never change a fucking thing. Give a real goal. Tell them you won't see a Warner Bros movie until they get off their asses and film Wonder Woman! Tell them you want as much quality put into films with women as put into films with men! Tell them you want a big-budget film with a female lead! Tell them you want to see some progress, dammit!!!

Eh.

Okay, that sounded great in my head but now that I have it written down it seems so futile. Various people have been sending that message for a while. Articles and studies and letters. Rational argument hasn't worked before. Maybe its because we haven't had any good fuel beneath it. This could be good fuel. Obviously, enough people have seized on it that it speaks to something people are pissed off about. Maybe we can combine outrage with a productive goal here. If we all shout "You said something bad!" they learn that what they said was a bad thing to say. They'll keep on doing what they do, just with their mouths shut. If we all shout "You need to do THIS" maybe, just maybe they'll realize they need to do that.

Maybe all it'll do is make us feel better. (Which is worthwhile in itself, but will lead to feeling like shit when The Dark Knight comes out and we all have to decide whether or not seeing a Warner Bros movie is worth it after this.)

I'm not flying off the handle... Yet...

(Via) From Newsarama:

According to LA Weekly’s Nikki Finke, Warners isn’t interested in making films with female leads. Her source? Warner Bros president of production Jeff Robinov who Finke quotes (through three sources) as saying: "We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead." Finke said that Robinov's sentiment/statement was confirmed by three producers

Original source here. Finke doesn't name the producers, just says there are three people verifying it.

Okay, maybe I'm flying off the handle just a bit. Kalinara is trying to talk me out of titling this post "Fuck you, Warner Bros."

A quick search on GoogleNews brings this article to light, which still pisses me off to no avail. Assuming the producer in question really is this much of a moron:

On a purely business level, though, if Robinov's declaration is more along the lines of "We are no longer doing action movies with women in the lead"... I'm afraid he's entirely justified. This isn't because a woman can't carry an action movie, but a acknowledgment of the deeply shitty reality that there isn't a single filmmaker or producer in town who knows how to develop an femme-led action movie that plays to the male quadrant (television is a completely different ballgame).

And it's a failure of imagination, really. In a way, I'd much rather see Jessica Biel as a former Navy SEAL assigned to track down terrorists threatening to blow up the Anheuser-Busch brewery. But no studio would ever greenlight Biel in a role developed for, say, Mark Wahlberg because they'd first call up the respectable grosses Underworld, Kill Bill and the Resident Evil movies, and, then, contrast those numbers with the not-so-good returns for Elektra, Aeon Flux, Domino, Catwoman, Ultraviolet, Point of No Return and, for the hell of it, V.I. Warshawski. And then they'd conclude that the risk is too high for the modest-at-best reward.

It sounds like they're using the logic that since Catwoman fucked up they don't want a female action lead because they assume all female pictures will suck. To which I'd suggest that maybe if they put more effort into making a female-lead movie work, like say a decent script, some dedication to the source material, and a good director rather than just assuming that big boobs will work box office magic they might find that female-led pictures would make more money.

Interestingly enough, CHUD above suggests that they know this, but might not willing to dedicate the necessary resources to a female-led movie because its a female led movie -- the logic of which pisses me off as much as the original unverified quote.

Family Approved?

Soyo snooped around and found more irritating stuff on the people who adapted The Dark is Rising into (*shudder*) The Seeker. It seems that the movie has been "family approved:

Of course, "Judeo/Christian values" and "positive family values" are buzzwords enough to chase me away, but I decided to look at exactly how they were reviewing films. Perhaps the most telling thing I found was a section labeled "content" that detailed anything objectionable that might be in the movie. In a way, they functioned rather like fanfiction warnings. Some of it was pretty laughable, putting "kissing" under the sex category, and counting the instances of bad language without writing out the actual words themselves. So you had "D" instead of "damn", and the like.

Other things were predictable, but still on the disturbing side. For instance, warning for "mentions of evolution" in an informative IMAX movie about dinosaurs. (Granted, as the daughter of two biology-types, I think people who "don't believe in evolution", should get the fuck over it.) Another thing that really bugged me was the constant chatter about fathers in the movie reviews, but very little mention of mothers. Look, I get that there's a big problem with dads being portrayed as immature and incompetent in the media. I agree that that's a problem, and I want people to fix it. But moms are important too. And it's ALSO quite annoying that the media assumes women automatically know how to parent, and LIKE to parent, and that any woman behaving otherwise is some immature freak.

Okay, whatever, crazy fundie website "approving" movies. They're out there, and most of them are even scarier. But for this one, producers submit the movies to be reviewed. So Walden must have submitted what once was The Dark is Rising up for review.

Now, this is old news that the company is a Christian movie company wanting to make Christian movies (but for some reason they bought the rights to a Pagan book series). But this is just one more layer on that that drives the point home that it wasn't just plain audience pandering, it was an actual attempt to edit out vital elements from the series because they weren't "wholesome" in their opinion.

Sure, I've heard the rumor that they've dropped The Dark is Rising from the subtitle is dropped, but that doesn't change the fact that the rights to the movies are owned by these people who want to suck the joy and wonder out of everything they touch in the name of "positive family values." (Because, of course, the only families are conservative Christian families and the rest of us don't count, and so our family-friendly books need to be turned into conservative Christian movies to really be family-friendly.)

The worst part of the whole thing is not that we're getting a sucky movie that's not meant for the fans of the books. Its that we'll never get a good movie after this. They own the rights.

Speaking of Blogwars

(I almost missed Friday Night Fights while I was writing another post.)

I should link these here more often

Because I've been keeping out of the blogwars too much lately.

You know...

That Wonder Woman Annual seemed very good. I imagine it would have been very good if I could remember what the fuck happened in Wonder Woman #1-4, or even find the issues to check (its been too damned long).

I say DC owes us a real Wonder Woman Annual.

I can't believe I read the whole thing.

So I read Chronicles of the Lensmen, Volume 1.

I know what some of you are thinking. "Ragnell, why did you go and do that? You know the reputation. You know its going to piss you off."

And for a long time, I put off reading these books. I knew they would be sexist. I knew the reputation. But seriously, its the fucking template for fucking space opera. Its arguably the mother of the Jedi Knights and the Green Lantern Corps. There was no fucking way I couldn't read this stuff, and the truth of the matter is there was guaranteed to be stuff I would love.

Fortunately, a big plus to having a blog and being in the feminist fan community is that I can read this stuff, enjoy what I enjoy, get pissed off at the sexism that keeps it from being as awesome as it could be (this writer had the ability to craft a kickass character, he just chose not to use that ability when it came to women and instead gendered strength and heroism) and complain about it to people who understand why I'm pissed off. Even with that in mind, this series is bad enough that I feel an intense need to justify that I kept reading the damned thing even though aside from the constant shitting on my gender the damned series feels like it was custom-written with me in mind.

In all honesty, I thought it wouldn't be so bad. I've read extremely sexist and misogynistic stuff from the King Arthur stuff written centuries ago and haven't gotten pissed off. I read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories and the Victorian attitude about women never pissed me off. It was part of the atmosphere, an anachronism. I figured I could just rationalize it away as "the attitude from the times" but I neglected two facts about this series: 1) A medieval setting where women are only princesses and barmaids is vastly less annoying than a future setting where women are only nurses and secretaries, and 2) It is a work that overtly worships masculinity and in the narrative (not the dialogue, or a first-person narrator, but the omniscient third-person narrator) goes out of its way to drop generalizations about women and uses the word "man" as a synonym for "hero".

In the first book, Triplanetary, I wanted to smack Clio. I swear, what a stupid worthless character and every stupid worthless part of her stupid worthless personality was attributed to her being a stupid worthless woman while everything that made her boyfriend a really awesome hero was attributed to his really awesome manliness.

I would've stopped there, it was pissing me off, but it was full of energy and adventure and detailed alien fish-people so I couldn't put it down. I consoled myself with the idea that I could find the author's grave and energetically voice my objections towards his rotting corpse when it was all over, and kept reading.

In the second book, First Lensmen, I was happy early on. Action-adventure set in outerspace, a couple of fun heroes and Clio was nowhere to be found. The only girl was mildly likable. I managed to forget for a moment that I was reading the Chronicles of the Lensmen, until Jill came back from Arisia with the explanation why women couldn't have a lens. The whole explanation just sounded mean-spirited and unnecessary. A "sex-based incompatibility." (I'm sorry, the color yellow has nothing on that one for idiocy.) It doesn't fit, and she goes on to say that the men she's with all have forceful, driven minds with tremendous scope ("pure killers") and a woman could not have that sort of mind. (This rules out any chance of a nice mean female villain. Which is a shame, because usually we can at least look forward an evil witch with a heart of iron that'll be turned into the misunderstood protagonist of an homage book.) She says there'll be one female lensman (I haven't gotten to that book, but I'm certain I'll be pissed off by it) in the future, and one of the guys suggests the female lensman will be some sort of freak thank you very much you bastard writer.

I'd have stopped reading in disgust, but I had nothing else to read so I went on. I was pleased by zero-gravity fight scenes later, but I got annoyed whenever Jill was mentioned. What made this worse was that the author very much wanted me to like her, and built her up in the dialogue and narration without coming through in the action.

They made a point of saying repeatedly that she didn't need a lens, her skills were fine without them. But oh wait, there's a scene where she figures out something fucking important with her skills but can't contact any of the others to help her (and can't do anything about it herself) because she doesn't have a fucking lens. She has to wait for someone to contact her mind before she can let them know (to the writer's credit, chivalry is put forth as a bad thing here, because no one wants to go near her mind without her express immediate consent but that doesn't change the fact that this all could have been averted if she had a fucking lens.)

Of course, after this scene (and after a later one where she gets captured and roughed up because she doesn't have a fucking lens) they all say that it was true she didn't need one, and that's she awesome, and that annoys me more than her being in a shitty position to begin with. It's the "strong woman" thing. The writers seem to figure if they say a character is cool and a "strong woman" enough, she is, despite the fact that she's purposefully written as less powerful than any of the male characters. And of course, the writer sits and congratulates himself on what an awesome "strong woman" character he's created, and how progressive he is and what a good person he is for throwing the poor woman readers who have so little an awesome chick they can look up to and emulate.

Anyway, this wouldn't piss me off half as much were it not still in practice today (See Winick, the Writings of Judd), and the plot still had me hooked and I liked the male characters when the writer was not going out of his was to point out how manly they were (please take note if you somehow stumble across this searching on your name, Geoff Johns, and consider your Hal Jordan characterization) so I continued reading, reminding myself this author was dead and probably reincarnated (for his writing sins) as a feminist comics blogger. (This has the upside of Stephanie getting her memorial case once the karmic debt from Lensmen runs out. It unfortunately has the downside of having launched a genre with this sexist shit that still needs to be cleared out so that's a pretty big debt.)

He wrapped the book up with some good old-fashioned (and I mean old-fashioned, this was from the days leading up to the Red Scare) dated political allegory.

I actually found Galactic Patrol to be the most enjoyable of the series, and the reason why will only really apply to me. The main character was named Kim Kinnison. My sister's nickname (for "Kimberly") is "Kim", so already I'm inclined to think "girl" when I see the name. The inclination was compounded because I knew a "Kinnison" in basic training.

Kinnison was about half my size, with shoulder-length blonde hair (always tucked behind her ears), very round dark eyes, and mildly chubby cheeks. She always seemed to have a bewildered expression on her face, because it was basic training and you had to stand there with a completely slack expression (or else you'd get yelled at and made to do laps or pushups or something exhausting) whenever anyone with stripes was around, and she had one of those jobs that had a lot of visibility with the military training instructors (we called them TIs in the Air Force, not Drill Sergeants). She was our "chowrunner" which is a job that involved entering the dining hall before the rest of the flight, standing in front of the TI table during the whole meal and directing her flight to where they needed to sit and eat. I'm not sure if Kinnison ate before or after us, or if she got to eat at all. I just remember her telling everyone how she'd stand there and one of the TIs would make funny faces at her, trying to get her to laugh so he could yell at her.

I tell you this much detail because this is the person I pictured whenever I pictured "Kim Kinnison." Smith didn't have much in the way of physical description for the characters, so even though I knew Kim was short of "Kimball" and I knew it was a male character, and even though Smith went out of his way to praise the character's masculinity, I still could not help but picture a short 18-year-old girl with shoulder-length blonde hair and a bewildered expression on her face throughout the entire book. It made the whole thing really interesting, I just wish I could draw you her face. Her eyes had the perfect roundness for an "Oh shit" reaction to anything!

Inadvertently, Kim Kinnison has become one of my favorite female characters.

That doesn't change the misogyny in the surrounding narrative (though it does makes it amusing to me).

Now, you'll notice this review is about gender-related issues. There's also race, sexuality, nationality, and religion to consider. Surprise surprise, everyone with a romantic subplot is straight. True, he doesn't really bother to mention race, but all of the names are European and some of the main characters are redheads and blondes. He has a Norwegian and a couple of Germans and everyone else is American. I didn't notice anything about religion, and I'm quite glad he didn't think to address the subject.

Overall, there is stuff I like better than the Green Lantern Corps and stuff I like less. I prefer the green energy to mind-control powers (though in the third book Kinnison gets really kickass really fast and my opinion on who has the better power set may change as I make my way through the last 3 books). I prefer the wristband to rings. The Galactic Patrol was set up much more intelligently than the GLC, with the lens falling apart once the owner was killed and killing anyone who tried it on but wasn't worthy. A smart idea, but offers less narrative flexibility. The Arisians being infallible (as of the third book) isn't as interesting as the Guardians being borderline psychotic at times, but that just demonstrates two different attitudes to government. The GLC and the Jedi both kick collective Lensmen ass by allowing women in the order (the next person who tells me the Silver Age Green Lantern is inherently anti-woman because it was based on the Lensmen novels gets a lecture about how E.E. Smith makes John Broome look like William Moulton Marston.)

It had some really kickass action in it and I did like the male characters despite the author's desperate, pathetic need to point out how manly they were. I also thought Clarrissa wasn't vomit-inducing, and Jill might not have been if not for the author's insistence that he wasn't being sexist with her plotline (I wanted Clio dead, though). I couldn't put the damned thing down once I started it, because while I'd not get pissed off by sexism I'd also not get to read zero-gravity fights and fishpeople and that bit with the cat in the barber's shop.

Ultimately, reading this series was like getting a lovely green leather briefcase as a gift and finding "To my favorite nephew" inscribed on the side. Its beautiful leather, holds everything I need, and green is my favorite color, but someone had to go and mark the damned thing for a boy. Every time I look at it I'm reminded that even though it suits me perfectly it wasn't really meant for me.

That sours any enjoyment I can get out of it.

The Rack

Ouch, poor Lydia!

Especially the last one, gross.

Discworld Filing

I've been trying to arrange my Discworld books on LibraryThing, and found that Wikipedia had different story sets than I did.

It seems they go by single protagonists (although I'm not sure how the History Monks get a grouping -- they strike me as guest-stars). I don't, though. See, I consider Tiffany Aching a direct continuation of the Witches books (her stuff certainly fits as well as Equal Rites does), and Rincewind's stories under the heading Wizards with the books that primarily feature Ridcully and Co. The Watch is definitely separate from the beaurocratic dreambooks that feature Moist, but I think The Truth with its politics in Ankh-Morpork setting attaches nicely as a prologue to the Moist storyarc.

Of course there's always going to be some overlap. It all depends on who seems to drive the story more and who is just there to be present. Death and the Wizards seem to share nicely, since the UU staff gets as much plot-importance as Death and Susan get in at least 2 of their books (Hogfather, Soul Music -- books about the nature of belief and magic fit both character groups). The Wizards and the Witches don't "share" -- the Witches get all of the major actions in Equal Rites and Lords and Ladies, and those are just Witch-style books. (Witch books seem to be about defying the expectations of the universe, Wizard books seem to be about discovering the nature of universe.)

I'm going by theme and mood, I expect. The protagonist sets the mood, yes. Some books are just Watch books. They have Watch-style plots and star those characters, and everyone learns a Watch-style lesson about humanity. They're set in the city. They usually end with Vetinari spouting philosophy. City books like The Truth and Going Postal have the same traits and characters, but they focus on someone other than Sam Vimes and therefore have a much more optimistic mood.

Susan books tend to have the same mood usually too. Tiffany and Granny have the same outlook, so naturally all the Witches books blend together. But Rincewind and the rest of the UU staff don't really have personalities that match, but the Wizard books have the same feel whether Rincewind is present or not. The story seems fresh and exploratory, I have to group them together. Moving Pictures just doesn't stand alone to me, its a Wizards book.

Am I the only one who arranges them this way?

In case my opinion on the killing of Kirby-creations is unknown...

Dear DC,

Yeah, I'm not buying it. The book or the premise.

You really think you'll be able to keep the New Gods dead for long? Give me a break. I've seen way too many of your writers and editors with a Fourth World fetish and seen way too much of Apokolips in every fucking book you put out to believe that. The reason you had to give them a break during Infinite Crisis was that they were overused in the 90s because your writers couldn't keep their grubby little fingers off the King's characters.

Either you're tricking us or you're deluded. Somebody's going to bring these guys back. You can't resist them. Too many of you grew up on them. Too many of you have fun with them. You can't go cold-turkey on Kirby. Its like trying to give up chocolate, and you don't have the collective willpower.

Someone is going to want to play with them.

Carnival Time!

The 17th Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans is up!

I'm still looking for hosts for the 18th Carnival. Email me if interested, please.