I'mma blogging in the rain, news is falling and I feel the gain

Hola, my wonderful and incredibly patient readers!

Sorry for the long lack o' blogging. Please know I am not dead, merely trying to write fancy-pants artsy-fartsy stuff, a poorly drawn webcomic and even a possible one-shot comic book for a non-major anything. Fingers crossed, I might even have something to put on display for my upcoming local comic book convention.
And yes, I know I deeply, terribly suck about my failure re: 14 Couples I Am Too Lame To Update. Again, sorry, about that and I hope to write something at least marginally coherent soon.

While I woke up too late for buying Wednesday comics today and have no limerick/haiku reviews as a result, I did find great news to share. I'm so enthused that I'm shamelessly regurgitating content I found at the always excellent Robot 6! Kathryn "Hellcat" Immonen
and Sara "NYX" Pichelli are taking over Runaways from Moore & Ramos starting with issue #11!





About Runaways - I love the book more than is healthy. For those of you who've lived under rocks, the series details the lives of a group of teenagers who find out that their parents are supervillains of the highest order. They run around the rarely seen West Coast of the Marvel U, just trying to survive, help out where they can and generally make amends for their parent's misdeeds. It's a brilliant premise with lovable characters and a pet dinosaur named Old Lace. Yes, that's right - a dinosaur named Old Lace.



Vaughan and Alphona's original run was something unique, fun and vibrant in the Marvel Universe - a breath of fresh air where continuity took a backseat to characters who mattered. A book where anything could happen, people could die and the unexpected was always expected. The series more than deserves the big screen treatment it's going to get and it's a flat-out great book, period.



Now, the downsides. I hate to say it but Joss Whedon and Michael Ryan's delay-plagued run just about killed the book. I'm usually a pretty big Whedon fan, so I feel bad to throw stones at all - hell, I imagine that writing a good story about a cyborg, two aliens, a mutant, a sorceress and a dinosaur can't be that easy. Still, several years later, I thought Whedon had written a good run but not a great one, Molly punching the Punisher aside. Putting Terry Moore and Huberto Ramos on the book after Whedon gave me high hopes but, well . . .



Regretfully, I say "meh". They just haven't clicked for me. While I've been flat-out loving Echo (I'd recommend this book and The Sword to just about anyone), I'm sad to say that Moore and Ramos' work on Runaways has left me more than a little cold. Ramos does great teenagers - his work on the excellent books DV8 and Impulse proved that without a shadow of a doubt. That said, his emphatic style's a bit jarring on the characters in Runaways, who've always been portrayed in an uniquely subdued way. Moore's stories haven't been thrilling me much either, which surprises me. His Chase is just a hair too obnoxious and I'm quite literally stunned that he got rid of a certain character. "Kill your darlings" maybe? Still, rather upsetting to see a character with such potential removed and such an fascinating relationship nipped in the bud.

In any case, here's hoping that Immonen and Pichelli can recapture that uniquely off-kilter mix of tenderness, hilarity, drama, dinosaurs and mutants that Runaways has displayed so well. Considering that Kathryn Immonen wrote the beautifully insane Hellcat series - wherein Hellcat has to defend Alaska all by herself, meets a talking calendar and then things really get weird - well, let's just say that I think she's got it covered. ;) And Pichelli's art is pretty damn nifty to boot (said art blog is NSFW, by the way).


(For instance, I LOVE the little details in this panel of Dr. Cecilia Reyes, folks. Sweatband drawstrings!)

What do you all think?

And as a bit of penance for my long lack of blogging, I bring you . . .

BONUS VIDEO CONTENT:

14 Comic Book Couples I Love - Part 7

Given my sloth today, I was tempted to put up part 2 of this series WAY earlier than planned. I mean, part 2 is just going to be a quickie one where I rehash the accolades of folks like Time Magazine and Neil Gaiman, then link to a 7-page preview . . . but no! I insist on giving you all your dollar's worth today, my friends, with an in-depth discussion of the wonderful couple known as . . .

7. Francine & Katchoo (from Strangers In Paradise)



Francine Peters and Katina "Katchoo" Choovanski don't have superpowers. They're just real women with real problems. They're messy. They're passionate. They circle around each other and hurt each other without meaning to. Their love can be both burden and gift. Unlike so many fictional couples, they don't just get a happy ending - they earn it. Welcome to Strangers In Paradise.



Terry Moore began this romantic series as a self-published comic and it soon rose in popularity until it was garnering Eisners. Strangers In Paradise, boiled down to it's simplest essence, is about three friends. Katchoo is a volatile lesbian artist with a past full of unsavory characters. Katchoo is in love with her "straight" roommate whom she met in High School - Francine, a beautiful, meek brunette with low self-esteem and a dreadful boyfriend. Enter David into the mix, a sensitive young man who falls hard for Katchoo. Now, a lot happens in the course of the series but the crux of it all (for me, anyways) is the story of how Francine learns to love herself and subsequently, Katchoo.



Now don't misunderstand me - this relationship is the opposite of a storybook one. At times, it seems like they fight, cry and run from each other more than we see them hold each other close. Francine has to deal with her religious background and how loving a woman might ruin her traditional dreams of a white picket fence and family. Katchoo, meanwhile, has a very ugly past and a lot of anger issues to work through. David and a myriad of other characters appear in their lives to make the questions they ask themselves about life and love even more complex, showing that sexuality is not an either/or. There's murder, heartbreak and a surprising amount of comedy along the way. This is not a simplistic tale with easy answers . . . which is why I've loved it so.



To be honest, I stopped reading Strangers In Paradise a while ago, much as I enjoyed Moore's beautiful, naturalistic dialog and flights of poetry. While the story itself was good, I felt like he was perhaps dragging it out a lot more than was necessary (and I gather from Interweb chatter I'm not alone in this). In the end, I felt the story had come to a natural conclusion and took one of the many alternate endings he presented as canon (a happy one with the two women as lovers who had raised a child together), so I can't tell you with complete certainty how the romance between Katchoo and Francine ended well. I can only tell you that those first few trades containing their story felt more real and honest than 75% of the fictional couples I'd read about or seen in any other medium. I still own volumes 1-7 of SiP and reading them is like getting to know old friends all over again. I'd like to complete my collection someday, just to see if I've been unfair to the talented Mr. Moore and so I can finally know how it all turns out.



In spite of my displeasure with the pace, I still want to thank him personally for this series and especially this couple. I find it especially heartening to read a love story where it doesn't all come together with a song and whirlwind romance. Seeing someone find an inner peace and a trust in someone they love after years of confusion and struggle feels more valid - and therefore more beautiful - than any simple, easy romance I could have posted. I mean, I love Lois & Clark or Ralph & Sue Dibny but they've never made me cry (and please don't mention Identity Crisis - that just made me nauseous and depressed). Terry Moore has made something unique that's touched a lot of people and proved that romance comics aren't dead. So for that, and many other reasons, I'm glad to spotlight it.



So, here's to Francine and Katchoo - the couple that taught me that not all love stories have to be easy. And to Strangers In Paradise, the comic that taught me that sometimes, the best comics are indie.



On a side note - I still think there's almost nobody more perfect than Terry Moore to take over Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane and I'm hesitantly optimistic about his turn on Runaways. How about y'all?

K. D. Loves Grant Morrison

So maybe I've gone a little overboard with the photoshopping here, but in a one-two punch of awesome news, it has been pointed out to me that Grant Morrison has ACTUALLY LISTENED TO TEH INTERWEB!!! OMFG!!1!

He has presented a brief glimpse of a Batcave containing a memorial for Stephanie "Spoiler" Brown in a recent issue of Batman (even if it is a sort of dream sequence)! I tip my hat to the wonderful ladies over at Girl-Wonder and When Fangirls Attack for keeping the faith.

And after eating my serving of humble pie for thinking DC was going to shaft us on a Girl Robin Case forever, I also found out today that he ended up using Emma Frost in his New X-Men run as a result of a fan's suggestion on his message board. I mean, wow. That's damned cool.

Morrison? I know you're listening right now - what with the 'actually caring about what us Internet types have to say' and/or the drug-induced Shamanistic connection to the collective unconscious - so I just wanted to say thank you.

Thanks for revitalizing Emma Frost and putting her together with Scott Summers, thus creating the most interesting relationship I've read in a Marvel comic for a very long time (and making Cyclops more interesting to me as a character by proxy). Thanks for New X-Men because, among many other reasons for loving it, it resulted in the creation of Astonishing X-Men which I absolutely adore.

Thanks for Animal Man, both post-modern and non, and his loving suburban family.

Thanks for Evil Skeets because that phrase is just flat-out hilarious to say out loud. "EVIL SKEETS!"

Thank you also for the awesomely trippy series called The Invisibles and the characters within, even though I haven't managed to find the fourth volume at the library yet.

Thanks for giving us fans an image of hope, however fleeting.

. . . Aaaaand I think I just used up my yearly quota of politeness, hope about the Internet to make real change and sycophancy. Back to my cynical hatred of all things before I run out of this emotion humans call "love" before Valentine's Day.


BONUS CONTENT!

As you may know, I'm not the only one who creates homoerotic Spider-Man joke art - there's a longstanding tradition of comedy gold already in place.

And in the spirit of cheap comedy, here's another easy joke about Spider-Man, this time referencing his unfailing love of Mary Jane (on a serious side note, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane is actually quite lovely and worth checking out. I'm definitely picking it up in regular issue form once Terry Moore comes onboard):

NSFW lyrics, just FYI


And since I like to pretend I have too much class for cheap jokes, here's a Spidey/MJ video with a song I actually listen to regularly: