a turquoise flower

Meme hosted by the Broke and the Bookish

so this meme asked for the top ten sites that aren't about *books* - comics aren't books though so I'm not really cheating. Right? I don't know. I do my own thing.

1. Tumblr: I feel like tumblr is the amalgamation of EVERY SITE ever on the Internet (and this list). But with more graphics and less annoying changes. I am on there way more than I need to be.
2. iFanboy: where I go for the majority of comics news; they also have nifty top 5 lists too and I can't resist lists (example: Top 5 Deaths of Jonathan Kent).
3. Archive of Our Own: this is the fan fiction site I left Fanfiction.net for (god FF.Net totally irritated me there for a few years with all of their changes and having to post anything new was such a hassle)
4. Comixology: so getting into comics is a bit daunting, getting into digital comics is EVEN more daunting, but I think sites like these facilitate that exchange.
5. Marvel: besides just being a great online encyclopedia of Marvel characters, the blog posts are worth a read as well.
6. DCComics: I really like their Preview Mondays and they've started doing creator profiles that are awesome - full list of creator portraits.
7. Comic Book Resources: while I get most of my comics news from iFanboy a lot of the time, the reason I really like CBR is they have previews of awesome comics that are due out that Wednesday or whatnot (um, I should say I am not all that enamored of its forums and stay away from them - and pretty much anything else with a lot of comments - but they do have awesome reviews and columns and blog posts like 'The Ten Cruelest Things Joss Whedon Has Done To His Characters').
8. Wil Wheaton's blog: so in my obsession-that-came-out-of-nowhere-and-punched-me-in-the-face phase of watching Eureka and seeing Wil Wheaton as the ass-holey Dr. Parrish (...I hope he won't always be cast in tv shows as the jerk character, I really, really hope), I somehow became a fan of his and then made my way over to his blog? Who the hell knows how these things happen. This post was especially awesome. (He also has some posts talking about the comics he's into at the moment which are relevant to me.)
9. Aria's Ink: the truly awesomest Sailor Moon site that's still alive and kicking (you have no idea how many awesome SM sites are long gone). And is SOOO awesome. I am not be as active there as I once was and I kind of feel sad about that, but you sometimes move away from your childhood interests and that's okay.
10. Twitter: gosh, Twitter is like the website that excuses you from talking about yourself nonstop about what you had for lunch; sure it's also practical for following famous people and authors and creators of awesome things, but it's mostly about ourselves, come on, who are we kidding.

From: Smallville Season 11 (2012) #1
larger image: http://oi49.tinypic.com/2ib2a7d.jpg
http://oi45.tinypic.com/2iaqz51.jpg

I know this comic premiered digitally only in April, but the small crumbles we get of Chloe and Oliver are just too adorable to pass over. (Clark and Lois are adorable too and we can say now that there's one book at DCU that doesn't mind showing their happy lives together as a couple. Yes, I know DCU broke up their marriage with the reboot a while ago and I should be over it...and maybe I will be in a few years down the road.)

Smallville as a show was about Superman's/Clark Kent's roots in high school up to college and getting a job at The Daily Planet and this season 11 comic takes place six months after the finale of the show. The art is something you have to get used to, unfortunately, as the artist tries sometimes to have the characters resemble their real-life actor counterparts and sometimes they don't succeed very well. The art might get better once the artist gets into the groove but as it is here in this first issue, I kinda wish they'd just draw the characters in their own style instead of imitating the characters.

From: Detective Comics #859 (collected in Batwoman: Elegy)

"Sir, all I've ever wanted since my mother and sister were murdered is to serve."

So Kate Kane's aka Batwoman's origin is pretty frickin' sad (when isn't an origin of a superhero sad, I guess?); her mother and twin sister are murdered when she's young and when she's a cadet, she's facing some "allegations" (basically she was charged with homosexual conduct) that would get her discharged from the military. (Kate's mother and father were both in the military and she looks up to both her parents very much.) She has a chance to say the allegations are false and it's a simple misunderstanding. Of course Kate could do that, but that would be lying about who she was. What she does here speaks VOLUMES about what kind of character Kate is - that faced with either lying or being true to herself, she picks being true to herself even if it gets her kicked out of the one place she felt she belonged and the one place she wanted to be in her whole life.

(The next few scenes with her father when she comes home after being discharged from the military are pretty heartwarming too and are one of my favorite father/daughter scenes.)

♦ a really cool Smallville census wherein there are cool pie charts and numbers concerning all the characters that came and went through Smallville in its decade. really awesome and I'd recommend a look if you're into numbers and stats and such. :D

♣ Y'know how you stumble onto something in life - like a certain hobby, or person, or expectation - and then you find out it's really not how you thought it was? I don't mean to be deliberately vague but this is hard for me to put into words, but I thought, what with this being the modern age and everything, that this sort of thing shouldn't happen. And that is DC ignoring its female readers. There's a Tumblr I've come to recently follow that says it much better than I could ever put into words, but to actually know that a major publisher of comics isn't really trying to target you as their readers? (by which I mean females like me) is just really shocking, to say the least. I think between Marvel and DC vying for my money, I'll gladly let Marvel win (even if they end up being like DC and totally ignoring their female readers as well). DC Comics to female readers: we’re just not that into you

♥ ribbon_purple is hosting a low-pressure Stargate (Atlantis, SG-1, or SGU) badfic challenge. As far as I know, you can write any badfic your mind can come up with and stories/graphics will be due July 21. So, if you're fan of writing intentional badfics and Stargate, take a look, yeah?

▲ Still trying to get into a good writing groove, which seems to have...vanished mysteriously for me someplace, which is particularly vexing because I have fic deadlines here, y'know, muse. I think Tumblr is all to blame because that site seriously sucks all the time into some space vacuum where twelve hours go by and you've done nothing but liked/reblogged a thousand pictures. Which is not to say that site isn't awesome or anything and I love it - as I think it's a particularly good way for a budding comics fan to really get involved in the fandom and expand on it - but dude, such a time waster. Alas, that could be said for the whole invention of the Internet - it can make you smarter and expand your horizons if you've lived a sheltered life, but on the con side, makes you waste a whole day doing nothing useful.