Astonishing X-Men #1-21 (written by Joss Whedon, art by John Cassaday)

I wonder whether I shouldn't have waited for the final issues to come out before reading. Now that I'm faced with a cliffhanger again, I remembered how irregularly this came out for a while. Still it was entertaining so far, and I like the mix of an overarching plot that's coming to a conclusion in the final issues, i.e. that alien world that is convinced by some prophecy that an earth mutant will destroy it, which makes for a nice mystery keeping you hooked, and the subplots threaded into that.

Though the subplots didn't all work equally well for me. The one with the mutant cure was pretty cool, but I didn't really get into the sentient danger room thing as much, though it wasn't bad. I have to admit that the Hellfire Club stuff left me mostly confused, as I had no idea who all these people and their history with the X-Men were (though I have come across some in fanfic), and I didn't know anything about this Cassandra Nova character and her history with Emma Frost. Eventually I read with a couple of reference and overview websites open and skimmed those to get the gist, but I still felt lost. How did anyone manage to follow superhero comics at all before reference websites?? Anyway, I suspect readers familiar with the background may get more out of this (or hate it for messing with something, I guess that's always a possibility).

Still, even with my confusion the basic suspense worked for me, or I wouldn't have bothered looking up all these Hellfire Club people and their history and powers in the first place. Also I'm inclined to like this X team because it has Cyclops, Wolverine and Beast who are among my favorite X-Men characters.

Untitled Highlander AU/Andromeda, by basingstoke. Het and slash (though there's no romantic focus, so it feels quite gen), Richie/Amanda, Duncan/Methos. (ca. 2,900 words)
Andromeda/Highlander
These are more glimpses at a universe than a fully realized story, but the setup is just very cool.

Necessary Changes, by devilc. Slash, Jason Street/Scott Summers, also Logan/Jean and some other pairings, both het and slash are implied. (ca. 24,000 words)
Friday Night Lights/X-Men
Jason discovers he's a mutant on top of everything else and is invited to attend the Xavier Institute. I'm really liking Jason here so far, and also his friendship with Tim, and of course I always have a soft spot for stories with Scott.
(It's still being posted, one part a day it seems, but the author's notes indicated it's finished and the total length, so in two days or so it should be completely posted.)

Days Like This, by killabeez. Gen, Angel, Dean Winchester. (ca. 9,200 words)
Angel/Supernatural
Dean and Angel meet on a hunt, and fight a gross, tentacled monster, but really the best thing in this story is the banter and the many great lines.

Untitled SGA/SPN snippets, by kitsune_tsuki WIP
So far more an enticing glimpse at a backstory and an opening snippet than a single story, but I thought the premise that Sheppard grew up as a hunter like Sam and Dean, and now encounters creepy supernatural stuff in Pegasus was cool.

To Conquer Fear, by marag. Gen, Gil Grissom, Batman and their teams. (ca. 2,800 words)
CSI/DCU
They work together to catch the Scarecrow in Las Vegas. The story is told mostly in emails and more on the fun than on the angst side of things.

Hailing From Parts Unknown, by sister_wolf. Slash, Logan (Wolverine)/Alec (X5-494). (ca. 3,500 words)
X-Men Movieverse/Dark Angel
Alec and Logan and cage fights. Why wouldn't you read this?

Office Hours (ca. 10,000 words) and the sequel The Wisdom to Know the Difference (ca. 30,000 words), by tartanshell. Gen, Peter Parker, Hank McCoy, Matt Murdock, and Scott Summers.
Spider-Man/X-Men/Daredevil
Peter meets Hank (at first not yet blue) as one of his biochemistry professors in college. This is just an awesome and very entertaining crossover, that has a great blend of humor and angst.

Floodlights on the Highway, by thassalia. Gen, Dean, Cam, Vala.
Stargate: SG-1/Supernatural
How could you not enjoy Cam and Vala meeting Dean at a car show?

Riggins & Winchester, by thisisbone. Slash, Tim Riggins/Dean Winchester, also Billy Riggins, Sam Winchester. (ca. 4,800 words)
Friday Night Lights/Supernatural
The Winchesters are passing through Dillon. This gives a great look at the characters, also of course it's hot.

Some good crossovers I've read recently...

1967 Plymouth GTX Convertible, Black., by basingstoke. Slash, Dean/Gunn, Angel, Sam. (ca. 2,100 words)
Angel/Supernatural
This one is just a lot of fun. They first meet over anti-zombie supplies, there's banter, Sam and Angel are playing euchre... also Dean/Gunn!

Charm City by hth_the_first. Slash, Sam/Tim. (ca. 7,630 words)
Homicide: Life on the Streets/Supernatural
I've only watched Homicide sporadically, but the relationships here between Sam and Dean as well as Tim and Sam really pulled me in.

Today's Tom Sawyer (1/2) and (2/2), by ladyjanelly. Gen, Sam and Ben. (ca. 5,000 words)
Dark Angel/Supernatural
In 2009 Sam runs across Ben, just after the X5 children escaped from Manticore.

The People You Meet, by mandysbitch. Slash, Chris Keller/Rodney McKay. (ca. 8,300 words)
Oz/Stargate Atlantis
I rarely read crossovers when I just know one of the sources, but I followed a rec somewhere, and the story pulled me in. I have never actually watched any episode of Oz (so I can't judge Keller's characterization), but I think it is pre-series for Oz as well as for SGA. Anyway, it starts when Rodney gets robbed by Keller, and things get more complicated from there at a fast pace.

Case X-1743: Unresolved. by minisinoo. Het, Mulder/Scully, Jean/Scott. (ca. 24,500 words)
The X-Files/X-Men Movieverse
While still working on the X-Files Mulder and Scully investigate the incident at Scott's high school when his powers first manifested. Years later Mulder notices Scott during Jean's tv appearance and they meet again. The plot is mostly just about getting the characters together, but I really liked how the universes meshed here.

Untitled SGA/Traders series, by Sealie (jimandblair). Gen, John, Rodney, Carson, Grant.
Stargate Atlantis/Traders
This one is still a WIP, but so far I'm really enjoying it. It's a good take on the "Rodney and Grant are related" premise.

The Monster in the Closet, by Shaye (fourteenlines). Het, Rodney/Kaylee. (ca. 3,200 words)
Firefly/Stargate Atlantis
Rodney and Kaylee meet as prisoners of the Reavers, so it is rather dark.

Don't Mention the Wookies by sheafrotherdon. Slash, McKay/Sheppard. (ca 1,400 words)
Stargate Atlantis/Star Wars
I waffled a bit whether this really counts as a real crossover, but I found its slightly wacky premise cute and funny, and it is definitely crossover-ish, so I included it in this rec set anyway.

Fandom: Marvel (X-Men)
Characters/Pairings: Ororo Munroe (Storm)
Rating: G
Media used: Pencil drawing, colored in GIMP
Warnings: None
Notes: When I asked for prompts to practice drawing emotions, catmoran suggested "Storm, happily surprised." This is the first time I tried drawing Storm, and I noticed that I have no clue what Ororo's natural eye color is when they're not all glowy white while she controls weather. Since it is much harder to convey emotions in eyes without pupils I wanted to draw her with regular eyes and decided on green without bothering with further research (I know, bad comic fan, no cookie), since I figured that those fit better with freaky witch-like superpowers than plain brown eyes. Anyway, I hope this nevertheless looks vaguely like Storm, and like happy surprise, and is what you had in mind, catmoran. You can also look at the initial pencils (ca. 56k). As usual, all comments are welcome.

( Storm, happily surprised, about 53k )

Remember a while ago back when I posted this scan of a kind of terrifying smiling Wolverine that was an example in the Wizard How to Draw: Heroic Anatomy book? Well, back when I first leafed through the book I was also pissed off at the chapters on drawing women (at some chapters more than others), but I couldn't quite figure out what exactly annoyed me so much, since it wasn't just straightforward sexism bothered me.

Not that that is absent, but it is a Wizard publication, and those chapters are explaining how to draw conventionally "beautiful" and "attractive" women for comic books, so it's not like I expected much in the way of feminist consciousness or anything. The mere fact that there are four chapters in the anatomy section on drawing women that have no equivalent for drawing men in their book is quite telling. The chapters in question are "Women" (by Joe Linsner), "Sultry Women" (by Adam Hughes), "Realistic Women" (by Terry Moore) and "Sex Appeal" (by Michael Turner). And yes, the one on sex appeal doesn't mention men at all. There's another one called "Superheroic Women" but there's also a chapter "Superheroic Men". Since the book is actually not that bad with including women as examples in the other chapters dealing with "regular" anatomy (hand, feet, faces, muscles, etc) compared to some other drawing books I've seen (like I mentioned in an earlier entry), it's unsurprising that the "special" chapters deal with women as sex objects.

I found the presentation somewhat bizarre in places, because clearly a lot of those sections were intended to come across as a bit self-mocking, only, well... I think an example will show what I mean. Here's a page from the chapter "Women" with the subsection for some reason called "The Triple Threat" (threat? wtf?!?), pointing out that main areas of interest in the blunt approach to creating attractiveness (from the heterosexual male POV) would be breasts, ass (they printed "butt" of course *eyeroll*) and legs. Duh. Who would have thought. I mean, that paragraph doesn't even explain anything about drawing any of these, so why include this? Actually Linsner explains at the beginning of the chapter that he's just going to explain what features he finds attractive in women, and is not actually going to talk about, you know, drawing these features. He continues for two more pages in a similar way, pointing out that eyes, hands, lips and hips were also attractive, and at the end I was mostly "whatever", but not all that aggravated.

That changed with the next chapter "Sultry Women", in particular with this page. The point this is trying to make about breast size and that larger breasts won't necessarily look better is fair enough, however it could have been done in a less offensive manner, that doesn't point to the example that fat women also have large breasts and of course "fat=ugly" is assumed as a given. I mean, in his chapter Terry Moore managed to draw examples that exaggerate the same problem (unrealistic breasts) along with some others, like here and here, and show how it doesn't really look good to draw women this way, without being that offensive.

But I realized that what aggravated me so much wasn't just the "fat is obviously ugly" aspect of that picture. While I'm not into the anorexic look and also think that what looks good in terms of weight, build, curves... whatever, depends a lot on the individual woman (or man), I'm not above conventional ideas of attractiveness either. I think what got to me is that she's a) eating and from the litter around her and the fact that it's not like she's sitting down for a meal it seems implied that she does so constantly (going with the cliche that fat people are fat because they have no self-control etc) and b) she's not even enjoying to eat, but looks very much unhappy. Combine that with the image that mocked the fanboy on the earlier page from Linsner's chapter which used "fat" among other things to evoke the impression of "ungroomed" and "unattractive" (though OTOH it also shows definite similarities with the artist, except for the hair-length, so there's the element of irony again), and you get this thread that fat is not just ugly, but comes with undesirable personality traits as well. Meh.

Anyway, this got me thinking about how bodies in general are depicted in drawing books, and I think often too little attention is paid to how different bodies look, when bodies are conceptualized in books on drawing humans. I mean, the obvious thing every drawing book will tell you is to study humans, draw from life, carry a sketchbook with you, blablablah, which is of course as true as it is supremely unhelpful. Nobody needs a book to know that to draw and study real people is good practice, OTOH drawing from life has also limitations, which is most likely the reason why you got the drawing book in the first place. Maybe the sketches from RL just won't turn out right and you want to figure out what you're doing wrong, or maybe you're at at a point when you need to "construct" and arrange a bunch of humans without direct reference to get the picture you want with reasonable effort. (Obviously you could try to convince a friend to crouch and jump with a fake sword while you study this or take pictures with a motion sensitive camera from exactly the angle you want, but you probably end up quickly with friends who get suspicious when you invite them over for "dinner".)

Depending on the focus of the drawing book it will more about the first or the second scenario, but in any case they usually break down humans in easier shapes, point out underlying functions, give a general sense of proportions, the usual, and as a part of that a more or less "generic human" tends to figure rather prominently in this. and unsurprisingly that "generic" human is usually a young(ish), white man, though young, white women appear too, and they are usually drawn in a way that is considered "well-proportioned" at the time, which fluctuates a bit, e.g in Georg Bridgeman's books (written in the first half of the 20th century) women are quite likely to have bellies that curve slightly outward, and are generally curvy (they'd probably count as "plump" these days).

Anyway, obviously when you look at this from a critical viewpoint this set-up is problematic to say the least, though considering the publication date of a lot of the "classics" I have in mind it's not surprising, but if you just want to use the book it's not that bothersome as long as your main "construction problem" is to arrage a body in space. A great example for this is Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Figure Drawing, which I own in a German edition (I don't think there are significant differences to the English one, but I'm not certain) and which is basically 170 pages explaining techniques how to arrange this "generic" human (obviously he's nude though not with detailed genitals, still some might consider the scans NWS) in space with the help of geometric constructions/visualizations like this one (it's kind of like virtually moving a ken doll). A couple of times a woman's body makes an appearance (while he has no distinctive face, she doesn't get a head at all in the bunch of drawings explaining how structures with women are different, mostly in the section on reclining poses, some in the sitting poses, none in the action poses...), but it's a negligible number of drawings compared to the male ones.

I actually like Hogarth's book quite a bit, like IMO he explains foreshortening really well, he explains how to draw humans from unusual perspectives, how you can draw human motion, and a bunch of other stuff that causes this book to be so widely recced. What it falls short on is the step to turn the ken doll you arranged in space into an actual human being with a distinct body. To be fair, I don't think it's the topic of the book, and I've never actually read all the text beyond that what was necessary to make sense of the constructions, so I have no idea whether or not he points out the issues of making bodies real.

A lot of drawing books seem to assume that that step, to make the human distinct isn't one that benefits from the same "constructionist" approach as the spatial arrangement, and that just observing enough different humans will work well enough to make the underlying principles clear. However, I found it rather helpful to have the ways in which bodies gain individuality laid out to me, because while that won't cover everybody either, it helps to make sense of the common variations. E.g. I wasn't aware that the area between the shoulderblades was all that noticeable in terms of body fat before reading this page (from Figure Drawing Without a Model by Ron Tiner).

OTOH with that book I frequently ran into the problem that rather dubious (or at least highly controversial) "scientific" classification systems from the 19th/early 20th century were turned into artistic tools without any reflection, for example the craniometry with its cephalic index (I didn't scan the pages applying those). I mean, it didn't bother me to read a chapter explaining about height/width characteristics of the human face and if he wants to use the terms "dolichocephalic", "mesocephalic" and "brachycephalic", okay, whatever, but considering that the book was first published 1992, it bothered me a lot that from just reading those paragraphs you'd think it was it was just an "neutral" anthropological measuring and classification tool, not invented to be central for a multitude of more or less racist theories, which construed skull measurements into all kinds of things. The same goes for the fact that he uses William Sheldon's somatotypes system (that was the basis for his strange anthropometry psychology, with things like predicting criminals from their body types and such) without finding it problematic at all. It's not that I didn't find the examples of body types somewhat useful (like here and here), and while I find it mostly silly to call them "endomorphic mesomorph" and such, I wouldn't care about that and just appreciate it that in this book not all bodies look the same, if there was some brief reflection that these body types weren't created to merely describe bodies, but that the system was created in a much more problematic context.

I mean, I like Tiner's book, it has a bunch of insightful observations and useful stuff, but as it was, my reaction was WTF? a lot as well, only over more complicated issues than say in the Wizard How To book. Clearly drawing books are bound to be aggravating in one way or another.

Somehow less intimidating than tackling the huge DC pile...

( Amazing Spider-Man #507, Daredevil #60, Excalibur #1 )

I really shouldn't be looking at comic news sites right now, however, on newsarama, I just read that Chuck Austen will be leaving Uncanny X-Men next spring, and that Chris Claremont and Alan Davis will take over. Now, I hate Chuck Austen less ferociously than some do, however his basic attitude towards both character continuity and fans who care about the characters is atrocious (I've commented on this before), and his current run on Uncanny X-Men is just bad. I mean, I picked up some UXM issues after X2 came out, to see whether I'd like the comics, and they just don't work, and I'm anything but a hardcore X-Men comic fan (as in I've read probably less than a dozen X-Men issues) taking offense at a bold new direction or arcane continuity errors.

Anyway, from what I've heard Chris Claremont's writing on his last run is seen less fondly than his first, and I'm not really familiar with either, but I don't think Chris Claremont can make UXM worse than it is right now. And what I've seen of Alan Davis' art is quite good. So I might give UXM another try next spring.

(Frelling LJ wouldn't let met post last night, so I only updated the blog then, now follows the belated LJ x-post.)

It occurred to me that if the X-Men universe was for real the first people clamoring for mutant screening probably wouldn't even be governments, but insurance companies. I mean, for example a personal liability insurance is one of the common insurances most people (at least here) have, but which company would like to cover the damages for people who when they unintentionally damage something don't just drop their neighbor's digital camera, but could cause earthquakes, flash floods, tornadoes, level city blocks with optic blasts, etc.? I bet that as soon as such abilities became common knowledge insurances would demand proof that your damage risks are ore or less "normal" if you wanted a policy from them, or even more likely they'd just preemptively exclude all mutant power related damages from the coverage such an insurance provides unless you get a special policy. And the whole mutant thing has to be a nightmare for the homeowner insurances too. I can totally see the rates for all kinds of insurances going up in areas with a lot of mutant activity.

I just finished reading yahtzee63's awesome X-Men movieverse story His Terrible Swift Sword, and I'm still in a happy daze.

So I did a search for when the X-Men 2 movie DVD would come out here (turns out it won't be until November), but as I searched for X-Men I noticed that there was an X-Men: Evolution DVD, too. I haven't seen this cartoon, but heard about it, and the price wasn't too bad, so I looked how many episodes were on this DVD. And then I noticed that whoever put together the release was a moron. It has five episodes on it, but not the first five episodes, nor a "Best Of" collection, no, it's the first five episodes of the second season. At first I thought "Huh, so there have to be earlier DVDs." but no, there aren't (well not Region 2 ones anyway). I mean, that just makes no sense, does it? Why would they start with the second season? I'm not going to shell out money if I don't even get to see the start of a series.

Smallville:
The Yard, by Jenn.
So far I really enjoy this WIP, though in some places I found it just a bit confusing. Still, I'm very curious how this will turn out. The new parts are posted to Jenn's LJ.

The Scientific Method, by Lenore.
It's really funny, I mean how could I not like a story that has lines like: "That's just great. It's like something out of a really bad comic book. The sphincter of steel. Able to maim sexual partners with a single orgasm. Now there's a super power to prize."

Intervention, by Hope.
It's a post Exodus story, and I liked Pete's POV, and the interaction between him and Clark.

LOTR:
Webs, by Roz Kaveney.
I've also recced this on my AU rec page recently, it gives us a look inside Shelob's head, set in a universe where events turn out really well--for her.

X-Men:
Since these stories have been recced all over the place you probably have read them already (well, if you're interested in X-Men fanfic at least), still, I enjoyed them. I didn't read X-Men fic after the first movie (and don't know the comics), and while my interest now isn't great, it was enough to check out X-Men rec pages during all the recent long holiday weekends (Ascension, Pentecost etc), with predictable results.

The Best-Laid Plans by Victoria P. and its remix The Best-Laid Plans (Art of War Remix) by Ransom. Both Logan/Rogue.

Climb the Wind by Minisinoo. It's sort of a character exploration through action-adventure focused on Logan and Scott. I could have done without some of the detailed medical descriptions of injuries, but I guess they just had their intended effect. Also check out Minisinoo's recent novel in progress An Accidental Interception of Fate, a Scott/Jean romance, but much more than that. I really enjoyed the parts with Scott in college.

Jus Ad Bellum, by Jenn. This one was chilling to read. And brilliant. Rogue from the familiar movieverse timeline (just a couple of years in the future) is thrust into an alternate timeline, where the original Rogue died on the Statue of Liberty. And things turned out really different. This story deals with morality, with terrorism, war and torture, and the choices everybody has to make each day. And it is chilling to experience alongside with Rogue how, confronted with the realities of that universe, her perception and reasoning start to shift, and how easy it is to slide into justifications, to adapt and accept.

Totally unrelated to any fanfic recs, I'd like to say that I thought one of the t-shirts I saw today was really crass: I showed George W. Bush's head with the word "Enemy" above and a bloody bullet hole in the center of his forehead. And I'm down with the anti-Bush sentiment, but with the bullet hole? Not so much, not even if it's meant symbolically.

yahtzee63 recently asked about must-reads in XMM fic, and I haven't read much X-Men fic, comic- or movie-verse, so I hadn't read most of those stories mentioned in that thread either, and decided to try some.

musesfool recced Save the Last Dance For Me by darkstar, and I could have really liked that story, had it been more carefully proofread. It's a Logan/Rogue futurefic set in a bleak future for mutants, one with registration laws where also their memories have been wiped, and while I'm not a Logan/Rogue OTP kind of person, I don't mind stories that are build around those two as OTP either. And this one is well written enough that I didn't even mind the OTP stuff that annoys me when it is done badly, motifs like the two of them meant to be together no matter the obstacles or the memory loss, completing each and healing each other etc. This kind of heavy OTP romance is not my kink, but I don't have a strong aversion against it either, at least not when it's done in an interesting story. And I really like this sort of post-apocalyptic futurefic (as well as AUs of that kind).

I never thought of myself as particularly nitpicky, and it's not like the story has mistakes in every paragraph or anything like that, yet somehow I found myself distracted this time, and the mistakes took away from my enjoyment, though I did finish reading the story. Maybe I'm getting more sensitive with time or something like that. Sigh.

Totally unrelated: I love June, it's past 9:30 p.m. and still daylight, and it's warm, but not hot. Somehow I forget each winter, when it seems like it's dark all the time, how cool it is to have that much daylight in the summer. Of course I don't really forget, not intellectually or anything, but each year around June it hits me anew that it is evening going towards night, and it's still light outside. It's strange.

I've watched the X-Men 2 movie twice, and I still didn't consciously notice that Nightcrawler only has three fingers on each hand, and only two toes on each foot. I mean, I guess I must have seen it, but it didn't really register. Then I read an X-Men comic ("God Loves, Man Kills" in case anyone is interested), and only through that I became aware of this rather obvious fact for the first time. My observational skills are truly pathetic.

I watched the X-Men sequel last night, ( ... )