On one hand, with the premise “adventurer can travel anywhere in time and space, in stories that can be pretty much any genre or mashup of genres”, it makes sense to me that Doctor Who would be such an incredibly long-running, popular series. But… (more…)
I’ve been slogging through a bad patch of depression for the past 4-5 months. I keep thinking I’m getting out of it, and then some little thing sets me off and I go tumbling back down into it. It’s frustrating and not that much fun.
I fell in love with Elizabeth Fraser in college. If you don’t know her, she was the singer and lyricist for the Cocteau Twins, one of the more well-known bands to come from the indie 4ad label in the UK (although maybe not as well-known as the Pixies, but that’s neither here nor there), their music known mostly for shimmering, layered guitars and songs with arcane titles and even more arcane lyrics, sung with beautiful, soaring, rolling vocals. They’re responsible for the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard in my life: (more…)
My entry into the corner of the Marvel Comics universe where the mutants hung out came from two different directions at once. On the newsstands, I started picking up the latest issues of The X-Men and was immediately drawn to the crisp, bold artwork of John Byrne and Terry Austin. The Marvel style of comics was to have every issue of a comic end with at least a little story left dangling to lead in to the next issue, more so than DC or any other comics company at the time, and X-Men writer Chris Claremont was one of the best at this, with several storylines weaving in and out of each other in every issue, some storylines running for months, some running for years, and some never getting resolved. Basically, there wasn’t a solid entry point to The X-Men, you just had to jump in and do your best to figure out who the various characters were and what they were up to. But it was colorful, dynamic, and a little bit weirder than most other superhero team comics at the time, so I was happy. (more…)
Besides watching Speed Racer and Battle of the Planets when I was a little kid, I haven’t watched many anime series until recently. Movies, sure. Akira, Metropolis, and a lot of Studio Ghibli, but when anime was shown on TV in the States, I never seemed to catch it. Thanks to Netflix streaming a number of series, I’ve finally been able to start swimming in the anime pool. I haven’t watched a lot, but I’ve watched enough now that I’m figuring out what I like and want to see more of.
The anime I’ve enjoyed the most are Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which is amazing, and Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic and its sequel series (really part of the same series), Magi: The Kingdom of Magic. I watched the last few episodes of Kingdom of Magic last night and it hit me that I liked it for a lot of the same reasons I like Fullmetal Alchemist, which are a lot of the same reasons I like superhero comics.
I love emotional characters making dramatic declarations (bonus points if they start crying, like Alibaba Saluja frequently does in Magi). I love characters in elaborate outfits standing in awkward but cool poses just before or after they unleash their unusual, flashy superpowers. And I particularly love epic conflicts and cosmic mysticism. (Is there an anime adaptation of the Mahabharata? I’ll be first in line to see that!)
Which isn’t to say I don’t also like smaller, quieter stories, because I do. But I really loves me some epic, cosmic melodrama!
