Ask Round-Up: May

Phew, okay, let’s try this again. A couple of notes to start off

-I’m not sure if I’m gonna be able to really make this a monthly thing because, I hardly have much time to post at all, and besides I ended up starting an actual personal diary which, has been actually very useful, for my mental health, definitely would recommend it. 

-Music theater’s taking a lot, a LOT, more out of me than I expected, it’s the biggest reason why I can’t post the way I’d like to given how time-consuming it’s been. But, I took up the course first and foremost because I needed an excuse to get out of home on the regular and put work into something that lets me build skills as a performer and connect with people and I’m definitely not dropping it now. It’s been particularly stressful the past weeks since they’ve been giving us tests and we’re being graded and, God, I did not miss this shit at all. But, fine, so be it. 

-I really do like some of the assignments I get and I think they’ve been helping me overcome my creative blocks, it’s another reason why I keep going. I like to prove to myself I still have that energy and passion even if I can’t yet apply it where I really want to. At least, not yet. 

-Don’t know why but, in some of my lurkings in the hearts of Twitter, I’ve been seeing a bit of an increase of people getting into The Shadow, people I follow at least, and that makes me happy. I even got to see people linking my blog in conversations where people ask about Shadow recommendations. I know in theory I’m supposed to play it cool about stuff like that but, I can’t, it fills me with too much joy for me to not share it with you.

(I’m not active on Twitter, nor do I particularly want to be. I mostly go in there for talking to friends and acquaintances and networking, and also because I needed to snatch up an account under my project’s name before anyone else did)

-I also don’t know why, but Mortal Kombat’s been doing circles around my brain again for the past weeks so, I guess if any of you want to ask me about my thoughts on MK-related stuff, be my guest. 

Anyway, on with some of the asks

Anonymous asked:  Did the trailer for PREHISTORIC PLANET leave you screaming with the raw ecstasy of “WALKING WITH DINOSAURS … as narrated by Sir David Attenborough” the way it did me? (Or at least the PROMISE of same - hopefully a promise that will be delivered on!).

Not quite, but you can chalk that up to me being used to dissappointment when people say “the new Walking With Dinosaurs” to promote documentaries that absolutely cannot, and even shouldn’t, live up to that, and also, I’m not terribly interested in having a new WWD anyway, I rewatch the Walking With trilogy every year anyway. BUT, I will say that, the trailer I saw did look absolutely lovely and I’ve been yearning somewhat to rewatch this kind of stuff, and also, I deeply adore just how receptive people have been to the T-Rex family and I do not get tired of all the jokes about this take on T-Rex being the Hank Hill of T-Rexes. I also love that it’s gotten some people talking about other non-WWD docs I really enjoyed growing up, like Dinosaur Planet. So, yeah, very happy for this one, happy to see the love it’s been getting too, even before release.

(Art by ColinM_Art)

@mirrorfalls​ asked:  Could you write - has there already been - a pulp story that contains no crime or death (not even the threat of it) whatsoever?

By sheer statistic probability, yes, but if we’re getting into specifics, you could actually argue that the most popular kinds of pulp magazines - those being the romance magazines, the railroad magazines, and the sports magazines - actually consisted largely of stories that didn’t have much to do with crime or death, at least not the way those are a constant in the kinds of pulps most people are familiar with. Pulp stories tend to be described nowadays as a genre, but pulp magazines were really a medium for whatever they could sell stories in. Unsurprisingly, the romance and sports pulps were easily the best selling ones and the ones that most endured even into the 1950s, and The Railroad Man’s Magazine lasted from 1906 to 1979, making it the longest-running and most successful American pulp of them all. 

The railroad magazines absolutely did have tons of stories about crime and death, some even ludicrous and horrific to an extent that dwarfed the crime and horror magazines, but those were a part of what they were about, not the entirety of it. The railroad magazines were primarily focused on, well, railroads and trains, and the kinds of stories that you could tell about, or with, them. In a similar way as to how the development of airplanes in the 1910s (starting with Santos Dumont’s 14-Bis flight in 1906, eat shit gringos) led to the Air Aces / aviation genre, and the uprising in sci-fi following the debut of space travel, the development of trains and railroad was an exciting new technology and career choice, and this was reflected in fiction:

• The focus on the railroad as the subject of fiction became genuinely intense, with an almost obsessive devotion to railroading techniques, equipment, problems and dangers.
• Writers like Bedwell, L.Packard and Spearman developed a stable of characters that the regular reader could look forward to enjoying like old friends (In this respect, early rail-road fiction is reminiscent of long-running television series employing characters who do not appear in every episode, but whom viewers welcome back on their return)
• One finds the railroad and its attendant phenomena - depots, diners, hoboes, boom-towns, ghost towns, strikes, speed, and sundry other matters - in prominent position. Whether the issue is the ugliest face of American racism, the most heroic actions of those who dreamed and accomplished some of the greatest feats of the industrial age, or the manner in which the railroad infiltrated and affected the American experience at almost every level, these writers have embraced the railroad in their work.
• D.J Smith characterizes the railroad, in the era before automobile travel enabled easy escape to somewhere else, as a “glamorous” and “mystical force that represented a route out of the constricting boundaries of rural and small-town life: "The train, although it could be used to represent more sinister forces, was an almost spiritual symbol of life to many fluttering souls caged.” -  The Railroad in American Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography, by Grant Burns

There’s gotta be other examples, mind you, but these three are the biggest ones that come to mind. So, yeah, there absolutely were lots of pulp stories with no crime and death. Hard to tell how exciting they were because their records are very much neglected by historians and considerably more sparse even by pulp standards but, they had vastly bigger readerships than pretty much all of the others even after the others had all ended, so evidently they were doing fine. 

Anonymous asked:  Is there any brazillian character in american comics that you think is a good representation of Brazil?

Not really, no. I really did try looking for the sake of this post but came up short. But I don’t want to leave this question unanswered, so instead I’m gonna talk about a character who did come to mind when I thought of a Brazilian character in media that I do think of as pretty great representation: Theo from Celeste.I’ve been playing it recently and this game has made a tremendous impression on me, I cleared the first 7 chapters on one night following one of the absolute worst sick days of my life and I’ve been waiting for my controller to get fixed so I can keep playing because hoooly shit do these B-Side chapters grate my nerves to try and play with using a broken controller, but nevermind that, I wanna talk a bit about Theo. And I don’t think Theo “represents Brazil”, whatever that means (which doesn’t necessarily mean a positive thing), so much as I think he’s a great representation of a Brazilian character.

Obviously a big part of why Theo is so unlike the overwhelming majority of latino / Brazilian characters in videogames has a lot to do with the fact that he was designed by a Brazilian artist, a major portion of Celeste’s main development team (including it’s character designs, 2D animation, concept and promo art, marketing, script editing, etc) is comprised of a Brazilian team named MiniBoss. And it shows because, and I know this word gets tossed around a lot but, Theo is authentic. Theo’s design and personality are unmistakably authentic. He’s an extremely positive character integral to Madeline’s journey, the feather exercise the game teaches through him is genuinely something that’s helped me and my sister deal with crisis a little better, he’s a pretty fun character too, he has really excellent conversations with Madeline, he’s a really great guy and a great friend, but the main thing that sticks out to me about Theo is that he’s real in a way I don’t think I’ve quite seen before, at least in games (but, really, anywhere on non-Brazilian media, to be honest). 

Much of Madeline’s design and character draw from her creator Maddy Thorson and she said as much, but looking at Theo’s character art in the Instagram profile made for the character gives me every bit the impression that Amora Bettany was drawing from somewhere close to heart when designing Theo and his own history. The character was apparently not born in Brazil outright (as he’s said to be American-Brazilian and dev Pedro Medeiros says he descends from a Brazilian family, which explains his English name) and apparently there was some confusion outright at first as to what kind of Latin-American he was but, no, even if the fact that he’s wearing the colors of the Brazilian flag didn’t tip you off, there’s no mistaking it. I honestly get a bit emotional looking at some of the art and dialogue for this game made for Theo, particularly when it involves his grandpa and sister.

I haven’t finished the game and I don’t know what happens in Chapter 9: Farewell as of yet, but Theo left such an impression on me, and such a positive one too. A character who is not a stereotype, not even really trying to consciously subvert stereotypes, he’s just a good character, a good person, and I never use that term lightly but I do think of him as great representation. There’s something very intimate, very warm-hearted and personal about Theo that’s worlds apart from the well-meaning-but-ignorant cartoons that tend to be Brazilian characters at best.   Theo is not defined by his nationality, the game never even mentions it and it doesn’t have to. Would I have liked it to be more obvious? Not really, and not just because it’s not his story, but also because, I like having it be low-key. Theo is Theo and being Brazilian is part of who he is.

Theo went to the mountain following the steps of his vovô, not even really knowing why he was going and worried he’d never figure it out where he was going, where he needed to go, worried he’d never find it. And he ends up being right where he needed to be, to help Madeline, and to be helped by her in return. They save each other’s lives, yeah, but more importantly, they lend each other space to talk, to open up, to lean on each other for support, and to offer help, and we learn that post-game Theo decided to go home and be there for his sister while still keeping in touch with Madeline. Like Madeline, his journey continues past the mountain, but now he finds himself closer to where he needs to be. Where he wants to be.

Obviously not saying I’d want all Brazilian characters to be like Theo but, it’s just, so nice, so refreshing, to have such a positive character like this. He’s not even my favorite part of the game but he made a tremendously big impression on me. Even if he’s not from the medium you mentioned, I couldn’t really think of another character to answer your question.

End of the Year: Some reflections and Ask Round-Up

Well, it’s the end of the year, and I figured I’d take the opportunity to talk a bit about it. It is, after all, the end of this blog’s first active year. 

Although I’ve been using Tumblr since 2013, I only really started actively posting, actually using this platform to write and share art, this year, and once again, I can’t thank you all enough for following me. These past two years have brought so many changes to my life, so many ways I’ve had to change the way I perceive myself and the world and all the long and painful roads we take to get where we need to go, but starting this year, I never regretted my choice to start engaging with people on this platform more openly, to start putting more of myself out there and being more confident in what I do, what I am and what I want to be.

I never thought I’d get to find a place to talk this much about some of my interests, or that I’d get people interested in hearing what I had to say about niche topics, or that I’d get to talk and meet wonderful people through here. It really means the world to me and I’m nowhere near started on all the things I want to do, all the things I want to share here and elsewhere. 

I do intend to start moving my creations to other platforms (I guess the word they use nowadays is “content”, but that doesn’t feel right to me), and I’m very aware that there’s only so much growth a platform like Tumblr allows, but I don’t intend to leave soon. I made a home and a name here after all. I intend to have more, many more, but we all gotta start somewhere and now, I finally did. Suffice to say I got a lot that I want to do, and a lot that I need to finish. So I figure before the year ends I’d start by getting around to some of the 120 asks I got sitting around.

I gotta be upfront in that I can’t give all of them the long-form essay treatment. It’s of the utmost importance for me to learn how to start editing, and that includes texts. So I’m gonna get to a whole bunch of them here, and maybe in another post. 

@krinsbez asked: I dunno if you’ve looked at it yet, but I wanna thank you for making some suggestions that helped me figger out what to do for Pulptober 2022; granted, I didn’t do all of your suggestions, and one that I was gonna do I suddenly blanked on while I was making it and did something else, but I hope you are pleased by the result.

I just did, actually, and thank you!. I’m gonna link it here for easier access. I actually like this one much better than your Pulp 2021, the naming of some of these is really inspired, and I really like the inclusion of characters like Six-Gun Gorilla, Ogon Bat and Imaro, and of course I really love the inclusion of Harry Vincent as the chief representative of a whole category. I do have my own take on Pulptober that I may or may not post the coming year.

@jcogginsa asked: Shot in the dark, but have you ever heard in the indian comic book character Nagraj?

I did not but goddamn I really like some of the art I’ve found for this character on a cursory Google search. A lot of times when I have to look up non-American/Japanese superheroes (or search for material to use in my Pulp Tarot videos) it’s very hard to find art like this or even much art in the first place, as usually the characters are too obscure or not very interesting to look at or it’s hard to know where to look to find. But I really like how this character looks and he seems to be a really big name with a lot of history and following. I really gotta look more into this guy, thanks for bringing him to my attention

@frankashazam asked: Thoughts on Flash Gordon? I’m deep diving into some comic strip heroes and he strikes me as a weird intersection of John Carter and Buck Roger’s, much in the ways Star Wars does.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Flash Gordon is FLASH

*BAM

AAH-AAH

HE’LL SAVE EVERYONE OF US!

And that’s kinda it. I know Flash Gordon is a really big name, definitely one of the most famous pulp heroes along with Conan and Zorro, and he definitely deserves a more in-depth post than what I’m giving here, but to be honest, without going into the influence of Alex Raymond’s art, I don’t think I have much to say about Flash Gordon specifically. The comics are gorgeously drawn but I can’t say the writing pulled me over too much, the movie’s fun (and Thor: Ragnarok owes it a big fat check), a lot of aspects of this franchise have aged really poorly and a killer fashion sense does not redeem a brutally outdated villain, but in going through the media, I ended up liking Flash himself as a character a lot more than I thought I would, he’s consistently a really nice character, the friendliest jock in the universe, a big-hearted fella who wishes these weird aliens would get along instead of trying to kill or enslave him and his friends. That scene in the movie where, in an effort to protect a woman he just met, he starts a big football brawl among aliens the minute he has something spherical to throw at people, really won me over on the guy. 

Anonymous asked: Who would win in a fight: Doc Savage or the Shadow?

The Shadow, because I said so.

@krinsbez asked: Do Jungle Girls in general count as Pulp Heroes, or only specific members of the breed?

They pretty unambiguously do, same as jungle heroes. I don’t really know what else to expand on with this question, it seems like a pretty open and shut case to me.

Anonymous asked: Are you planning to see The Suicide Squad ? I’m asking because this is basically a movie about a bunch of American mercenaries doing a black op in a South American country but which still try to avoid the most problematic aspects of the concept, and I would have been curious to know how much do you think it succeed at it.

I did actually watch it, didn’t really feel like doing a post at the time about it. I think the movie’s approach to that political aspect was  really half-assed, like it wanted to have it both ways and be really critical of American interventions in South America and the darker aspects of American foreign policy in general (I mean, it gets some props for that, the overwhelming majority of superhero movies don’t go nearly that far) but it also wanted the main characters to still be mostly likeable and hands-free of the ordeal and also for them to get credit at the end for “liberating” the country and, the movie shows the Squad murdering an entire camp as a bad thing but then Harley Quinn slaughters an entire building and it’s very clearly meant to be badass and empowering and, look, the movie wasn’t thinking hard about it and neither will I.

But in short, I liked it. I thought it established it’s characters really well, but I felt that the movie in general was kind of stupid and hapharzadly put together in how it handled said characters, I think the movie was only really genuinely great in some parts, mainly those with the core cast interacting and the Peacemaker-Rick Flag segments, goddamn was Peacemaker incredible in this. I really loved Ratcatcher 2 and Polka-Dot Man and I really wish I could have liked King Shark more but they straight up forgot to give him narrative closure, Bloodsport was cool, Harley Quinn was there, I had a pretty fun time watching it, but a lot of it felt strangely incomplete. Still liked it fine.

• @drvonsteel​: Have you ever read Atomic Robo?

I actually got a couple other asks about Atomic Robo, and no I haven’t. I’ve known about it for a long while, it seems to get a lot of comparisons to Hellboy and Mike Mignola’s aesthetics and storytelling, but I haven’t touched it yet. 

By the way, if any of you have asked me something along the lines of “Have you watched/read -X-?”, chances are I haven’t replied to you either because I’ve never interacted with the thing, or because I want to get around to it and eventually make a post of it. 

Anonymous asked: Just found your blog. Awesome to see someone who remembers the Shadow. If if you’re still doing crossovers, how do you think a meeting between the Shadow and the German Doc Savage, Sun Koh, would go?

Thank you! Oh I assure you plenty of people do remember The Shadow, but more so than that, I want to make it so a lot more people who don’t actually get to know the guy. Now, as for your question: See, I know Sun Koh has a whole bunch of ideas in his stories that could be used to make a story out of this, he’s got a whole saga to him I already talked about briefly in my post about Atlantis. But a crossover usually implies treating both parties of said crossover with something resembling respect or acknowledgment of artistic integrity, and the very idea of giving Sun Koh a modicum of the thought or respect I apply to other characters makes me taste bile. Sun Koh is not the German Doc Savage, he was the Nazi clone of Doc Savage, and nothing the Nazis ever created, no bastardization of concepts they tried to claim as their own, deserves the kind of attention or touch that could be afforded to any other creation. You’re asking me to cross over The Shadow with the Nazi Doc Savage and how it would go, like there’s any other way this story could end in anything other than this

-being the softest end I can imagine for that guy.

Anonymous sent:  Mental Image of a crossover between Miss Marple & The Shadow where the latter comes to St. Mary Mead in search of an urban legend of the British police and is absolutely THRILLED that the legends are True (The two of them will, of course, casually solve mysteries in the course of chat over afternoon tea).

Anonymous sent:  Mental image of The Shadow having a crossover with Poirot in which the two of them spend the ENTIRE Mystery playing the age old game of ‘I know you know I know … but we’re not admitting it’ until the PoV character can’t even begin to work out what the two of them ACTUALLY KNOW and solves the mystery themselves out of sheer frustration.

Nothing further to comment here, I just really like these. 

Anonymous sent:  Is there a Gotham City villain more likely to produce an entertaining set of memoirs than The Penguin? (Catwoman could, but probably wouldn’t care to; The Riddler might, but would all but write them in cypher to keep the Best Bits to himself; the other Rogues would either be unable, unwilling, too untrustworthy or too darned depressing - if we want the Good Scandal - not to mention acid wit, gentleman bandit ingenuity, bird puns et al - we’ll have to head to the Iceberg Lounge!).

Anonymous sent:  I remain profoundly certain that the Best way of giving the Penguin positive attention would be to write a novel or series of short stories disguised as a very, very old Oswald C. Cobblepot’s memoirs of Gotham City’s most colourful era - and make it THE most entertainingly scurrilous combination of “Can’t believe I got away with this!” schemes and “Can you believe this guy?” anecdotes about EVERYONE (Bonus points if Batman comics help set up these memoirs as True - from a certain perspective).

As well as these and I’m pretty sure they were sent by the same person. I really like getting these asks.

Anonymous asked: Assuming you watched it ,any thoughts on No Way Home?

I did watch it, I went with a friend of mine who’s obsessed with Spider-Man and grew up with the Raimi trilogy, I went based on his recommendation. To put it into perspective, neither of us had any kind of prior affection for MCU Spider-Man, in fact we actively disliked the first two films. So when he left the session singing praises to high heavens about this movie, and not just the Raimi parts, I was very interested. And keep in mind also that I’m not an MCU fan, I haven’t watched anything MCU since Thor: Ragnarok and didn’t really have intent on changing that. I only bring this up to put it into perspective just how much this film won me over, that I went back to watch it again. 

I really, really liked it, I felt like I got to see the conclusion of three trilogies and a movie that pretty much fixed some of the biggest issues all three of the Spider-Man trilogies had. It’s got some problems and I do think Into The Spiderverse is still the better film, still the stronger and more concise narrative, still has the better protagonist and I’m still pretty strong in my opinion that Peter B Parker is my favorite movie take on Peter Parker (although I’m definitely convinced that Andrew Garfield is my favorite live-action Spider-Man), but it speaks volumes about how much I liked No Way Home that there was any debate at all over whether I liked it better than Spiderverse, and Spiderverse didn’t have moments of fanservice that turned me into a chimpanzee at the movie theater, and it didn’t have Alfred Molina and Willem Dafoe to attack my heart.

Seriously I think I also went in mainly because I really love those two and their characters and I really wanted them to see them tackle them again, and I honestly didn’t think they’d get anything but glorified cameos when I heard they were coming back. I was very glad to see that they didn’t undo Doc Ock’s arc from Spider-Man 2 and that they gave Molina a chance to play both sides of Otto even if only briefly (I definitely would have traded a lot of the Dr Strange scenes for more with the villains or Charlie Cox as Daredevil) and oh man was I BEYOND HAPPY to see Willem Dafoe pull grand larceny on the entire goddamn movie, finally getting to act his heart out without that mask and be goddamn horrifying in ways he was never allowed to before and, just, goddamn I live for a great villain performance like this, that alone was worth it. I had a really great time.