Just a quick note to remind any readers who are attending Dragon*Con this weekend that OutlantaCon and the Brit Track are throwing a queer-targeted Rainbow Flag Party on Saturday night from 10pm to 12:30am. From the pocket guide it looks like that happens in the Sheraton but honestly I am not sure that I have quite worked out how to read this thing. I'll be wearing a nametag with my nom de plume and a black shirt. I know, I know, it's shockingly original con wear but sometimes one must simply pick a stereotype and lean into it. Feel free to come hang out at the party, say hi and get your groove on. I'll also have access to email all weekend.

Maybe after we can stalk Peter David together stalk cute nerds together compare notes on the Dragon*Con experience!

Hooray! We have winners for our American Vampire giveaway, courtesy of the amazing Scott Snyder! I corresponded with our winners yesterday to find out how they'd like to be identified and here they are:

• The signed issue #5 of American Vampire goes to a Pink Kryptonite reader who is herself a writer of horror fiction: Carrie Clevenger of Texas, who noted that American Vampire got her permanently back into reading comics.
• The signed American Vampire promotional poster featuring portraits of Pearl and Skinner Sweet goes to Pascal, a Pink Kryptonite reader from Germany.
• The complete, autographed set of American Vampire issues #1 through #5 goes to Pink Kryptonite reader S. Thalmann from Michigan.

That is some sweet prize-related action, and many thanks to everyone who entered our drawing. It was great getting to swap an email or two with everyone who entered and talking about how much we all love American Vampire and especially the incredibly generous Scott Snyder. Thank you, Scott!

Reaction to the giveaway was great, so hopefully we will be able to line up something else like this with some of our other favorite books in the future. Thanks again!

Question: who else is going to Dragon*Con in Atlanta on Labor Day weekend? I lost the scarlet V of con attendance in June by going to Heroes Con and that inspired a friend to suggest we attend Dragon*Con for the first time. We've both thought about attending it before but we're both also a little intimidated by the complexity and sheer size of Dragon*Con. Peter David is on the guest list, though, and the potential of getting him to sign an X-Factor or my copies of the Legions of Fire books is way too exciting for me to let a little thing like shyness get in my way.

I bring this up here in hopes that there are members of the PK community with strategies for finding the good stuff. Right now, looking at their website and the fan tracks, it all seems a little overwhelming in terms of figuring out what to do and where to go. At Heroes Con, pretty much everything was in one big room. Dragon*Con is clearly a wholly different kind of animal.

I'm also mentioning it now in case there are PK readers who want to get together for a social hour over beverages on the Saturday of the convention. Surely somewhere at the convention, or nearby, there is someplace that won't be packed with tens of thousands of our fellow fanfolk... right? No? A bit of naïveté showing there? Probably so, but it's worth a shot.

Leave a comment or send me an email if you want to share a tip for navigating the cosplay sea. If you want in on a social hour, shoot me an email off the blog at klarion at pink kryptonite dot net.

Just a quick reminder that if you want in on the Great Pink Kryptonite American Vampire Giveaway then you should enter soon as I'm drawing the winners on Sunday afternoon. Haven't entered yet? That's easy: send me an email at klarion at pink kryptonite dot net. All you need to send me is a note that you're entering. We can work out mailing addresses and the like once you win. If you don't hear back from me within 24 hours that your entry was received, send it again.

See the original post for full details!

Spoiler Alert! The full post contains some spoilery discussion of events in the film itself!

Rubber Justice suggested last week that we both see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World this weekend then produce a joint review of it. We've both read a portion of the Scott Pilgrim comic book but neither of us has read the whole thing. I thought this sounded like a grand idea and yesterday we hashed out our thoughts.

The short version? We both liked it and we both kind of didn't. It's interesting, because this book is obviously extremely popular but everyone I know has roughly the same set of heavily mixed reactions to it and that's before anyone gets into discussing the character of Wallace. The process of translating a comic into a film doesn't usually do anything to improve the iffy bits, either. All this added up to what I think are a really interesting range of responses to the film.

Read on for Rubber Justice's and Klarion's thoughts on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World!

Reactions to the Original Comic

Rubber Justice: There are plenty of comics that I appreciated more than Scott Pilgrim. The first volume was odd; It appealed to my fanboy, but not to my tastes. Artistically, the little sketches infuriated me, reminding me, perhaps unfairly, of quick linework that paid no attention to what the illustrations were saying. Storywise, I felt like it was transmitting a beat I wasn't picking up: An evil ex crashing a performance from seemingly out of nowhere, a main character who was a bumbling fool I couldn't relate to. I thought it was a book that pandered to cultural callbacks, all style and no substance, so I never picked up the series again. Then Edgar Wright's film managed to completely subvert these thoughts.

Klarion: I just don't "get" something about the book. I like almost everything about Scott Pilgrim except for... Scott Pilgrim. I just hate the main character. I liked all of the supporting cast and I liked Ramona and I normally like the "meet cute" story just fine but I made it through the first two volumes of the comic and have never bothered to crack open the third even though it's been sitting in my car for six months. Something about it really didn't connect for me.

Practical Analysis - Storytelling & Character

Rubber Justice: I think one glaringly obvious feature in the movie is the way it so comfortably inhabits its own universe. You never get a reason for why Scott can protect himself from mile-high tosses or brutal beatings, but you don't ever need a reason. Ramona uses Scott's mind as a highway and you get one sentence to state it and another to make a joke of it, then it's over. In the book, I took all the info boxes and captions as humorous asides. With the film, they're tools for a deeper reading into an entire universe that exists within a less-than-two hour timeframe.

Most of all, I appreciated the varied characters presented throughout the story. Ramona, with all her ethereal quirks is still a real woman, a hipster-chick who's alienated the people around her in a concentrated effort to be so different. Then there's Roxy, who's less ashamed about her bifuriousness than her former lover, and seems to embody all indecisive qualities. It's hard to judge if her rampant self-doubt is a complementary characteristic of her sexuality, as that would make her a little one-note, but the general impression left by her character is an interesting one for the limited screentime she has.

Klarion: I also came away from it thinking, wow, I still love everything about Scott Pilgrim except for Scott Pilgrim. I love most of the supporting cast, I love the villainous cabal as metaphor for someone's emotional past, I encourage stories that recognize that being a grown-up enough to have a big-boy relationship includes accepting the past that made the person, etc., etc., but Scott Pilgrim himself is just this mewling kitten of a character. If he had any less agency he would dissolve into protoplasm. Ramona has to constantly warn, apologize, defend and fight to recover herself from her past but all Scott has to do is realize he was kind of a dick and boom, everything is fixed? Lame. My boyfriend calls that sort of movie "the tale of a man who felt an emotion".

LGB Observations

Rubber Justice: Wallace Wells. Billed as the "cool gay roommate". His comedic support was appreciated, he was sassy and smart, but he came off often as the amalgamation of so many stereotypes. Both a whore and dramatic foil whenever the script demanded, I went through phases of praising him and raising my eyebrows. At first I'd thought Culkin's character was an extreme version of every bland gay character to limp their wrist through a bad TV drama, but looking at how the other friends from the movie possess this quality of 'other'-ness, I can reconcile the continuance of a stereotype if it's what makes the character a vital piece of the narrative. In fact, I have my own evil ex that matched all of Wallace's negative qualities, and took no foul from the prejudices that certainly could be read.

Klarion: Yes, Christ but Wallace is stuck in the angel/whore dichotomy. This is very much a textbook-straight, male movie. Wallace is the
closest thing Scott has to a mother, the only one with a sense of detached objectivity about things, the moral compass and the relationship-destroying cock-rocket that steals his sister's boyfriend in the first scene. (Confession: I found that totally hot.) Maybe O'Malley had a hot gay roommate who fit all those roles, I wouldn't know, but it seemed to me like either O'Malley wanted to include a direct reproduction of a real and exceptionally over-the-top person he knows or he felt like it needed a gay character and he didn't know what to do with one so he made Wallace do everything. (Also, to be fair, O'Malley did not write the screenplay; it might be different in the book.)

On the other hand, Wallace got most of the good lines.

On the other other hand, "I don't want you gaying up the place?" Total rage blackout.

The portrayal of Roxy (whose appearance in the comic, assuming that happens, I haven't reached in my reading) also really bothered me. Much as I loved the phrase "bi-furious" - my boyfriend is bi and I tend to be a little militantly opposed to some people's backwards notion that bisexuals somehow aren't queer enough or that it's not acceptable for sexuality to be fluid and playful and ambiguous; we do not march in the street so that we can be limited by their labels for us, y'know - I was really bothered by Ramona's kneejerk "it was just a phase" comment and the way Scott literally physically destroys Roxy using her own sexual nature. Some external G spot is her weakness? Seriously? Death by orgasm? Seriously?

Overall Impression & Concluding Thoughts

Rubber Justice: Scott Pilgrim has an explicit message about what it means to love someone, and allows for a few observations on the pathos behind hipster culture, but outside of this, there wasn't too much to take away; It's an over-the-top action movie polished in a nerdy lacquer, and I fail to see how it can have that degree of permanence that others claim it will hold. I wouldn't have minded waiting for the DVD, though I still recommend watching it sometime, because the two hours it lasts for are thoroughly entertaining.

Klarion: I seem to have a lot to gripe about, yes, and yet I really enjoyed it and I want to see it again; the next day I gave it a four-stars-out-of-five rating in conversation with a friend. It is just absurdly entertaining and fun. I have to recognize that when I was 22 I did a lot of stupid whinging and hiding from the world, too. It could very well be that the character of Scott Pilgrim grates on me for no reason other than that I'm 35. Everything I didn't like, when I talk about it, inevitably circles back to talking about how much I did like the movie overall.

If You Started a New Romance, What Aggressive Form Would Your Past Baggage Take?

Rubber Justice: Let's see, if I were the cause of a league of evil exes... There would be a boyfriend who was the avatar of gluttony, capable of shooting down any attempt at compassion. After winning a sloppy, greasy sumo fight, you'd have to face off against a trio of prom dates, a triple Hecate of miserable wenches who were lied to and used as cover stories that need a sappy apology speech before they can concede the Bo staff of Self Acceptance, neccesary to defeat the final demon of Lust. He's the bastard that's caused a million drunken conversations, that stares and judges every passerby in the street. No idea how you could beat that guy, the battle rages to this day.

Klarion: I'm pretty sure my malcontent past would achieve malevolent sentience as a sequence of brands of bourbon who soften you up before the obsessive crushes on straight guys arrive to finish the job; oh, and one remarkably callous foreign grad student. One wins by not blacking out or by lasting until the end of the academic calendar. Not a good scene.

I haven't gotten as far as reading #3 of this comic - released last week - but over the weekend I did read issues #1 and #2. As a huge fan of the cartoon a decade ago I was very excited to see the resumption, brief though it be, of Terry McGinnis' career as the Batman of the Future. Unfortunately, so far this comic seems to be more about Bruce Wayne's past than Terry's future. It's an entertaining book, yes, but it isn't exactly what I'd hoped it would be.

Read on for more thoughts (and send me an email at klarion at pink kryptonite dot net if you want in on the American Vampire giveaway)!

Fast forward to now, and when I saw this on the shelf of my local shop I snatched up the first two issues without even a glance at the inside. For me, pretty much anything with the Batman Beyond logo on it is worth the price of admission. I settled in at home and read both issues in a row and I'm still impressed with the quality of the treatment this property gets and the maturity of its storytelling. Despite Adam Beechen having no role in the original TV series he clearly gets the relationship between Terry and Bruce Wayne, including its affections and its tremendous stresses. Wayne is nothing if not the DC universe's superlative control freak and Beechen plays to great effect on Bruce's passive-aggressive tendencies in his relationship with Terry: Wayne never thinks anything Terry does is good enough but he always pushes Terry to do more of it. The pseudo-parental relationship between them is one with which many of us can identify, queer or otherwise, and Beechen does not shy away from the claustrophobia it creates.

The art is also very good in this book, definitely up to the standards of the original cartoon's visually striking design. Looking at these two issues, they looked like Batman Beyond. Seeing a visually unique property recreated after a long period of dormancy - and seeing a visual style originally created for television converted into static images - is very impressive.

So what's my beef? That in issues #1 and #2, anyway, the story doesn't really seem to be about Terry. It seems to be much more about Bruce and his past than about McGinnis and his future. There's little if any appearance of Terry's school, his girlfriend, his mother, his little brother or any other aspect of his life outside of the suit and those were some of the things that most made the show as interesting as it was. Whereas Bruce Wayne's personal narrative is one of the phoenix-like rise of a hero from the total destruction and arguable abandonment of his personal life, Terry is the Batman who's trying to walk the line between hero and human; that is, ultimately, the heart of the tension between him and his mentor. Part of what was so thrilling about Batman Beyond was that Bruce Wayne was such a negative example to Terry, easily as much a warning as an inspiration. Terry is initially inspired by tragedy, yes, but his living family and support structure are the fuel that keep the engine of ambition running for him and without those elements - and given what the plot seems to be in the first two issues - the story in this Batman Beyond comic series feels like it's more about Bruce Wayne's abuse of Terry's body by proxy more than about Terry becoming the real Batman. Even Terry's scorecard in the suit seems absent, in that there's only the tiniest acknowledgement of his unique cast of villains and the various ways they act as foils.

Last year my biggest complaint about the em-dash nightmare Dark Reign - Young Avengers - The List was that it didn't seem to be about them so much as it served as an opportunity to remind us that they existed while telling a story about someone else. In some ways, Batman Beyond #1 and #2 feel the same way.

But will I keep reading it? Absolutely. For one thing, despite my complaints above this feels like Batman Beyond and I enjoy reading it. Even if it's stripped of some of what made the original property so compelling to me it's still very entertaining and it has not been hollowed out or abused. The hyperbolized emotional struggle between Terry's desire to be a kid and his desire to make a difference in the world are the coming-of-age metaphor that most made the show relevant to me, yes, but there are a lot of other dimensions to the characters and their relationships and this comic is unwaveringly true to those elements. An honest assessment includes that there were plenty of times when the TV show was as much about Bruce Wayne and his freight car of baggage as it was about Terry, so in that regard this comic series is simply taking a different angle of the show and blowing it up into a comic book. Again, that it isn't the element that most interested me doesn't mean it's invalid or badly done; to the contrary, Beechen is much more willing to "go there" in terms of how Wayne wobbles between mentor and abuser and I have zero doubt that plenty of people - young and old - need stories to help them work through such relationships.

So, overall, a mixed review: this is an exceedingly well-crafted work, yes, and I will absolutely finish out the series. It doesn't seem to be about what I hoped it would be about, thematically, but it's still very much Batman Beyond and any fan of the TV series would be well served by picking this up.

Graeme McMillan has an excellent post over at CBR concerning the reputation of literary comics, and how readers may be unwilling to approach certain graphic novels because of the notoriety that surrounds them.

It's more than a little embarrassing to admit, but up until a couple of years ago, I'd pretty much successfully gone out of my way to avoid reading anything by the Hernandez Bros., and it was almost entirely because of the reputation of their work. Surely, I thought, nothing could stand up to the probably-hyperbolic praise thrown in their direction!

Which is an aspect that I believe most regular comics readers have sensed before. Certainly, price and availability are a huge factor in whether or not I buy a comic, or even if I'll try flipping through it at the bookstore café, but there are definitely books that have been bumped down on my "must-read" list based on hear-say or prejudices formed through other peoples' readings of a comic. A big one for me is The Dark Knight Returns. I feel like I've missed its moment of temporal poignancy, that I can't appreciate it after reading from a comics industry that's already taken so much from it. I'm not much of a Frank Miller fan anyway, with its dirty cops and neon cityscapes, but it's the weight of the book's name that keeps me from reading it. But Graeme concludes, correctly, that this self-restriction is a folly:

I was an idiot every single time I got scared of a book because of its reputation. For one thing, it's comics - You read it and it clicks or it doesn't, and that's the end of it

I wholly believe that we learn by taking in things from outside our established comfort zone, and I'm really impressed by this point. Guess I'll be picking up TDKR sometime soon, then. Anyone else avoiding the top shelf out of a silly fear?

Just a quick reminder that if you're interested in one of the various goodie packages from American Vampire's Scott Snyder to readers of Pink Kryptonite, you need to send me an email at klarion at pink kryptonite dot net. In that entry you simply need to make it clear that you're entering this drawing; no other information is necessary at this time. I will reply to let you know your email was received; if you email me and receive no reply within 24 hours, email me again to be sure.

You've got until Sunday 29 August to get in on this sweet drawing, but why wait? You know you want this stuff!