New and wired: Feminist righteousness about an outdated sales model that refuses to account for the ways new comics readers tend to consume comics (ie trades and digital).

What I’m saying is that I just read four trades of Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen’s series Descender, and I dug it so much, yet I am making no plans to read it in issues going forward. And I don’t feel guilty about it! I don’t! Reading in trades is just a better and more satisfying way to read comics and I’ve decided it’s also more feminist, do not @ me.

(Note: It is not more feminist to read in trades than to read in issues. I’m just being silly. It would be more feminist if comics counted sales of trades as sales when making decisions about what titles to renew, but that is outside of your or my control unless you are a major decision-maker at a major comics publisher, in which case I’m kind of surprised that you’re reading this post.)

(I do not know how this post turned into Comics Sales Data and Why They Bug Me 101. You will now be returned to your regularly scheduled review post.)

Descender is about a little boy called Tim who’s searching for his mother and brother, missing for the last ten years. His main accomplices are a drilling robot from the mining planet where he grew up and a robot who is a very good dog. His main obstacle is that androids are illegal due to unrest arising from MAJOR ROBOT DESTRUCTION that happened ten years ago. If Tim and Driller and Bandit are noticed by any of the numerous robot bounty hunters that roam the galaxy, they’ll all be destroyed.

Because oh yeah, Tim is a robot too. Also, his code may contain the key to fighting back against the robots that attacked humanity so devastatingly a decade ago.

If you’re anything like me, your first question was Are Tim’s mother and brother dead? and I’m going to answer that question because the answer to it is one of the reasons I’m enjoying this comic so much. If you don’t want to know the answer (it’s revealed fairly early on in the series run, but it is a reveal, and you may want to go into this clean), stop reading!

The answer–and I guess I should include some interim text so that your eye doesn’t inadvertently skip down a line and see the spoiler even if you didn’t want to, which means I have some room to mention another immensely frustrating thing about dependence on the direct market, which is that preorders are super important to whether a title achieves the markers of success that comics publishers like DC and Marvel are looking for; and that therefore new titles or titles by new creators (which women and people of color are more likely to be!) don’t see the same preorder numbers and are more likely to be judged as sales failures — is that the mother is dead (alas) but the brother! is! alive! And in fact has grown up to be this very grim sort of Winter Soldier-looking motherfucker who makes his living by killing robots and collecting the bounty on them.

GASP. I know. So what’s going to happen, you inquire, when Tim-the-robot meets up with his brother Andy-the-once-normal-kid-now-stone-cold-robot-murderer? I DON’T KNOW YET. I HAVE TO READ TO FIND OUT.

There are many other plotlines in Descender, including a society of robot outcasts that has banded together and become radicalized against humans (as who can blame them?); a cyborg lady who used to date Andy until she decided his career choice was too grim for her; and a human-army lady who more than anything wants to find a way to defeat the Murderbots (they’re called Harvesters) if they ever return. She’s not good with kids but I think she and Tim are going to become good pals, anyway.

Descender! It’s so fun! As long as you don’t tug too hard on the threads of the metaphors! (But that’s the way with a lot of SF allegories, don’t you find?)

The post Descender Made Me Feel Things about Robots appeared first on Reading the End.

Through the Woods, Emily Carroll

Yeah, I can only assume that Emily Carroll knows me personally and designed Through the Woods to cater to my interests. It is a collection of some hella creepy stories about living near a forest. Girls go into the forest, and they come out different, or they don’t come out at all. This may be very shallow of me, but I love graphic novels where the lettering looks like proper handwriting. Though Saga has many charms, an early and prominent draw for me was the fact that Hazel’s narration is drawn in real handwriting. Similarly:

Love it. Next I would like Emily Carroll to write some retellings of underloved fairy tales. If she could start with my beloved favorite “The Six Swans,” that would be absolutely swell. Her color choices and creepy little writings are so good it’s hard for me to deal with them.

This One Summer, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki

Remember when I said that the Tamakis’ book Skim captured perfectly what it was like to be a teenager? Well, their 2014 book This One Summer also captures perfectly what it is like to be a teenager, while depicting almost none of the same aspects of teenagerhood we saw in Skim. Here it’s two girls who have been coming to the same vacation area every summer for years. But this one is different, because Rose’s parents can’t stop fighting, and Rose finds herself angrier and angrier.

Everyone in the blogosphere who ever recommended This One Summer was right. I loved it. It’s a little more focused than Skim plotwise, and although there are elements of the Problem Novel to it, it saves itself with absolutely lovely visual storytelling and a wonderful depiction of the fifteen-year-old best friends, Rose and Windy. Highly, highly recommended.

(There’s a character called Jenny. Guess what happens to her, oh I will just give you a hint, the answer is nothing good. But at least she’s not a servant or a prostitute, I guess.)

Sweet Tooth, Jeff Lemire

The news that Jeff Lemire will be taking over writing Hawkeye when Matt Fraction (sniffle, sob) finishes gave me the push I needed to finally read something by Lemire. The library had the full run of Sweet Tooth when I visited, so it was Sweet Tooth by default. I had the notion that it was a story about a person who could sense things about objects by ingesting them — and I am still pretty sure there exists a comic book with that premise — but actually it’s a dystopian story about a half-deer-half-human kid trying to find safety in a dangerous world. So…pretty different from what I was imagining.

If I step back to evaluate Sweet Tooth, I have some problems with it. I’d have liked to see more depth and complexity to these characters: Sweet Tooth is your standard-issue hero kid, and Mr. Jepperd is your standard-issue tough guy tormented by his wife’s death, and a lot of the secondary characters are fairly bland as well. And there’s more than a whiff of fridging around the wife’s death in terms of the motivation it provides Mr. Jepperd, and I’m as far over that as it is possible for a woman to be, and Jeff Lemire is a teeny weeny bit on notice as regards tropes about women.

BUT: I couldn’t put this series down. I limited myself to one trade paperback a day and tore through the whole thing in a week. I’ll forgive a lot in a good yarn, and Sweet Tooth definitely is that.

What comics have y’all been reading?

The post Rounding up some more comics appeared first on Reading the End.

There are many reasons to feel grateful that I live in the times I live in, but here’s another one. Tom Stoppard has a new play at the National, and although reviews of it have accused it of being all ideas and no feelings, I still want to see it. And because of technology, I can. And that is pretty great.

Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction, that widely-beloved power couple of the comics world, are coming for your televisions. I have just ceased to care about any of the Marvel TV shows, and I’ll be caring about this instead.

In other Matt Fraction-adjacent news, Jeff Lemire and Ramón Pérez are taking over Hawkeye after Fraction and Aja finish their run. Sniffle, sob, but — well okay! Their ideas about the series sound rather cool!

Do y’all know about how crazy I am about family corvidae? In case you are like “what, crows are not that good,” let me go ahead and prove you wrong.

Bahahaha.

You have most likely already forgotten about that dress that was maybe blue and black or maybe white and gold. But cast your mind back to those forgotten days, and then read this piece by Megan Garber about attention policing.

A version of the movie Foxcatcher that I would actually watch.

Y’alllllll, I love Eddie Redmayne, I truly do, but why is he playing a trans lady in The Danish Girl? It’s not that I don’t think he’ll be good. I know he’ll be good; he’s a good actor. But I am so tired of hearing “we cast who was best for the rule” as a defense. You know who else might be good for the role of a trans lady? AN ACTUAL TRANS LADY ACTOR I DUNNO JUST SPITBALLING HERE.

In which Kate Elliott reminds writers not to default to male.

A profession I did not know existed: Recording the dialogue used for crowd scenes in films.

Some of my favorite bloggers are launching the Book Blogger Buddy System, where you can go to acquire a blogging mentor or just ask questions about blogging.

Laura Miller is at Vulture to talk about fanfiction.

Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillion are making a short-run show about two guys from a beloved canceled TV show, one of whom becomes Matt Damon famous, and the other of whom spends his life making the rounds at various conventions around the world. They got funded almost immediately because those dudes are the best.

An extremely touching article about finding a fat YA heroine in Eleanor and Park.

Happy Friday!!

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