Also likes scifi, cartoons, musicals, writing, admiring beauty in all its forms, and just... well. Learning things! Knowing about stuff! (Hence the blog title.) Full fandom/ship list available above.
My queue is always on - if you follow me, expect to see 4-8 things a day that I like, in addition to my tl;dr Opinions on Everything and tag-only Rant Posts.
Which really means “back to my comics store!”
They didn’t have a number of things I was hoping for (no Blue Beetle TPBs! no Ultimate Spiderman #5! not even the Teen Titans volume I asked them to order for me last month (though, since it was last month, it probably got sold to someone else)). I did manage to get:
For all that I sympathize with Arthur, Lancelot’s my favorite character. As portrayed here, anyway - I can’t judge most other versions of the Arthurian characters.
I can’t say for sure what it is that draws me to him, but a good part of it is this: that the love came over him so gradually he didn’t recognize it for what it was until he accidentally blurted it out. (Inasmuch as you can have kinks for romantic cliches, obliviousness and pining are big kinks for me.) I think I wouldn’t like Lancelot nearly so much if I had to listen to his pining rather than read it, though - after this comes a lot of anguish about betraying Arthur in his (thought to be) one-sided affections for Guenevere, which would be a lot more drawn out in a TV show than it has to be in a comic.
(Background for this one - in the contemporary arc, Arthur and Merlin have webcomics. Because of reasons.)
It kind of amazes me to think that this comic was around for a year plus before Supernatural was even being announced. I mean, you tend to think of TV shows over five years having been going on for ages, and with Supernatural at seven seasons it’s practically ancient by TV terms. But comics that last are measured in decades. AKoTaS has only been around since 2004, but as far as webcomics go there’s few still around that can beat that.
As to the joke - when you think about it, the artist had no way of knowing they’d end up giving that title to an episode of the show. He came up with the joke independently, and that makes it funnier in retrospect.
Here’s a future-set comic from the space arc - one of the early reasons for my optimism about the resolution of the famous love triangle.
I completely understand the artist’s urge to jump forward in the timeline. When I’m writing a longer story, sometimes I get bogged down in the duller details of the Now and want to jump ahead to a more interesting part, or to a future moment relevant to the current story. The artist for AKoTaS does the latter really well (and with a sensible reason!) for an arc a ways ahead of where I am in the story. I’ll probably post the comic in question when I come to it.
![Here’s one from the so-called baseline arc - the story which most closely resembles the original King Arthur (as much as there is an “original,” when the source material is a mishmash of different stories written at different times and mixed together because somebody felt like it).
I always feel badly for Arthur when it comes to romance. In the space arc, [spoiler] kind of destroys his first love, and in the baseline arc the things Merlin mentions in this comic… well, they don’t call Arthur a tragic hero for nothing. The contemporary arc leaves me a little more optimistic, as does the second love in the space arc. But more on that later.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwbynvDz6C1qi79qxo1_500.gif)
Here’s one from the so-called baseline arc - the story which most closely resembles the original King Arthur (as much as there is an “original,” when the source material is a mishmash of different stories written at different times and mixed together because somebody felt like it).
I always feel badly for Arthur when it comes to romance. In the space arc, [spoiler] kind of destroys his first love, and in the baseline arc the things Merlin mentions in this comic… well, they don’t call Arthur a tragic hero for nothing. The contemporary arc leaves me a little more optimistic, as does the second love in the space arc. But more on that later.
More from the contemporary arc - Arthur and Lancelot meeting for the first time irl.
I’m not much of a webcam user myself; if I was in their shoes, I’d probably have to confirm usernames rather than frame each other’s face to be sure I had the right person. But I do like that they met online - a lot of modern AUs accept as their premise that all the characters grew up in the same town (except for The New Kid or That Foreign Exchange Student), but I prefer this alternative.
I’ve been going back through the Arthur, King of Time and Space archive since the comic came off its six-month hiatus the other day. I think I’m gonna post some of my favorites here.
I like this one - and much of the contemporary arc - because it feels perfectly natural for the characters to talk about these issues, and because all sides of the argument are more or less equally represented. It’s not the author using the comic as a soapbox, and it’s not one-sided rhetoric.
Guys, it’s OK to link to the source of these things. In this case, it’s my friend Chris Sims over at Comics Alliance.
Also, I’m posting this again for future reference.(And no, I am not blaming anyone but the original poster for this. OK, maybe I’m blaming Diane a bit.)
This is what superheroes would be like if they had Facebooks
Oh my god Superman
Oh God that Daredevil one made me laugh out loud.
I’m not sure, but I think the Spiderman one is my favorite.
(via cartoonmoney)
Source: thetruelyonking
Look, I like gritty. I write gritty. There is a time and a place for gritty. I’ll take my Batman gritty, thank you, and I will acknowledge that such a portrayal means that my 11 year old has to wait before he sees The Dark Knight. But if Hollywood turns out a Superman movie that I can’t take him to? They’ve done something wrong. Superman is many, many things. Gritty he is not, something that Richard Donner certainly understood.
(Pet peeve time: for the contingent out there who sneer at heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman and Captain America, those icons who still, at their core, represent selfless sacrifice for the greater good, and who justify their contempt by saying, oh, it’s so unrealistic, no one would ever be so noble… grow up. Seriously. Cynicism is not maturity, do not mistake the one for the other. If you truly cannot accept a story where someone does the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, that says far more about who you are than these characters.)
This is not an argument of era or audience sophistication. Sophistication does not negate sincerity, nor does it even deny it, as the Captain America movie proves. Sophistication demands better storytelling, clearer motivation, purer intention. “Gritty” is an apologist word in this sense, used in the place of “realism.” We don’t go to the movies for “realism.” This is why documentaries aren’t the major product in the theaters. Sophistication does not demand realism; it demands smart.
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