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Five Female-Led Comics to Read While Waiting for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Get It Together

11/28/2016

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So, is a Black Widow movie ever going to get out of early development?
 
Will Disney ever get over its fear of having its new superhero sub-department contaminated by the female market segment, and give girls everywhere the stories and toys they’re clamoring to pay good money for?
 
Will our daughters’ daughters someday be able to live in a world where a movie that lists a female hero’s name second in its title isn’t considered radically progressive?
 
I don’t know.
 
But in this particularly difficult time of setback for women, I’d like to take a moment to recognize the fact that we’re living in a renaissance of actual, paper-and-ink comic books that respect and celebrate female power.
 
I’ve written before about why Harley Quinn is an important character for women in spite of being a terrible role model, and I continue to enjoy her antics, flaws and all, in the New 52, but thankfully, she’s far from being all we have.
 
So, while you’re waiting and campaigning in righteous frustration to end the shut-out of women in the mainstreamiest of mainstream storytelling, remember to take occasional, much-needed refuge with…


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5: Bombshells
 
This alternate DC timeline follows some of the most prominent female characters of the universe as they develop their identities – independent of the often male-mentored circumstances of their main universe origins – against the backdrop of World War II.
 
The sexual prejudices of the forties exist here to be faced but never hold the characters down for long, especially once Amanda Waller begins to earmark superpowered women for her alternate universe, Hitler-fighting Suicide Squad – The Bombshells.


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4: She-Hulk (Charles Soule)

Sadly, this title didn’t run for long, but I highly recommend grabbing the two volumes that exist.
 
Jennifer Walters (a.k.a She-Hulk) is the professional woman’s hero. After leaving a prestigious law firm that expected something different from her than good legal work (ostensibly because of her superpowers, but the parallel to her gender is clear), she’s determined to start up her own successful law firm. Naturally, her first solo case drags her into a far-reaching conspiracy that tests her skills, her principles, and most importantly, her ability to count on her substantial brains instead of her physical talent for smashing.


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3: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl
 
This is possibly the funniest and most good-hearted comic in existence. It’s self-aware and optimistic, and Doreen Green’s confidence and genuine kindness are wonderfully infectious. She loves her curves, she loves her friends of both the human and squirrel variety, she loves her work helping people, and she goes out of her way to love her villains.
 
She’s the unbeatable Squirrel Girl, because she’s the hero who takes the time to chat with Galactus about his eating habits, after a discussion on the evolution of gendered pronouns that warms this English major’s heart.
 
She’s exactly what’s needed for both young girls looking to get into comics that welcome them, and for adult readers who need a break from the doom-and-gloom of other comics.


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2: Jessica Jones: Alias
 
…Then again, sometimes you need a hit of the grown-up dark and serious. That’s where Jessica Jones comes in. She’s the gritty anti-hero with all the flaws and baggage of her most popular and fascinating male counterparts, which makes her refreshing in her own way, because flaws are exactly the critical character component that’s so often lost in the effort to make female characters “strong” enough.
 
Jessica’s a hardboiled private investigator with a drinking problem and a past made of horror and failure. She’s an inconsiderate, self-destructive mess, and she’s exactly who you want on your side when you need to get to the bottom of a mystery for the right cause. She’s crude and sad and smart and infuriating, and utterly compelling on every page.


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1: Ms. Marvel (G. Willow Wilson)
 
There are no words adequate to express the importance or coolness of Kamala Khan (a.k.a. Ms. Marvel). She has the kind heart and optimism of Squirrel Girl in the #3 spot, but with far less insulation from serious, real-life issues.
 
Kamala is the new hero of Jersey City, somewhere people like the Avengers don’t tend to pay much attention to protecting. She’s also in the thick of growing up a millennial Muslim girl in the U.S, facing challenges both universal and specific, and always complex and relatably presented.
 
She’s new to her powers, bringing back the superhero metaphor for the combined terror and empowerment of puberty, and through everything from family fights to bad dates to chaos-sewing visits from Loki, the reader gets to watch her grow into a hero for a new generation.



Got more favorite female-led comics to recommend? Comment below!

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Movie Review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

11/20/2016

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Movie Review:
 
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
 
2016
 
Grade: D
 
 
Note: Most of my movie reviews are intended for readers of the adapted source material. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, while sharing its title with a short, mock-textbook companion piece to the Harry Potter series, cannot honestly be said to be an adaptation of anything, so much as a screen-original spinoff. Even so, as an attempted extension of the Potter-verse, I count it worthy of a reader’s perspective review.
 
The Basics:
 
English wizard naturalist, Newt Scamander, is illegally carrying a case of magical creatures in 1920s New York when they inevitably escape, requiring the help of Tina, a disgraced local Auror, her Legilimens sister, Queenie, and Jacob, a muggle who happened to be in the way, to recover them. Also there’s some growing anti-magic sentiment stateside, and some havoc being wrought by repressed magic as a result.
 
The Upside:
 
One or two jokes land, and both the magical creatures and the flirtation between Jacob and Queenie occasionally border on cute.
 
The Downside:
 
In spite of J.K. Rowling’s sole writing credit, there’s hardly a glimmer of her usual spark here, none of her signature whimsy, humor, terror, adventure, or deep friendships to be found. The characters are flat, their relationships largely forced, their motivations fickle and underexplained. The importance and urgency of both containing the creature infestation and keeping muggles out of the loop are subject to change at the drop of a hat, and the wonder of the magical world is shown only through often destructive scenes of creature spectacle, divorced from character and plot. The effect is less a curious desire to be a part of magic and more a questioning of whether the muggles are so wrong to fear and resent it.
 
The plot is beyond slight, or rather, both plots are. Newt’s search for his creatures and the unrest between the magical and non-magical communities barely intersect, except for a brief scene in which our heroes are abruptly condemned to death by corrupt officials and just as abruptly forgotten about and apparently pardoned immediately after escaping the execution chamber. When it comes time for the finale and its potentially city-ending stakes (born of the non-Newt plotline), the task of saving the day falls to local magical law enforcement, while Newt and company contribute nothing but reaction shots, getting beaten up, a little bit of “I told you so,” and a poorly foreshadowed memory-alteration-by-creature.
 
The ten second glimpse of the dark wizard Grindelwald at the end gives a by then unwelcome reminder that this is only the first installment of a spinoff series, an idea made all the more clearly inadvisable by this failed attempt to stretch the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them concept into even one movie’s worth of story.




Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Love, Books, and Protest

11/12/2016

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Fellow equality-loving bookworms, what is it we’ve been shouting for the past few months?
 
“When they go low, we go high.”
 
We still can.
 
Sorry to be cheeseball in this time of mourning, but the cure for hate and oppression is the same as it always has been: compassion and education.
 
Peaceful demonstrations are a nice gesture to show off how much we care, but if you really want to stick it to bigotry, here’s a list of organizations that can help you put your passion and skills as book lovers to constructive use right now, helping the people who need allies most.
 
So consider protesting in the form of…
 
Helping ESL immigrants study for the citizenship test:
 
http://www.montereypark.ca.gov/264/Literacy-Citizenship
 
Mentoring girls on their way to becoming authors, and making their voices heard through storytelling:
 
http://www.writegirl.org/join-us/
 
Mentoring girls in underserved areas on their way to a college education:
 
https://moste.org/want-to-join/be-a-mentor/
 
Helping homeless students pursue better futures as an afterschool tutor:
 
https://www.schoolonwheels.org/volunteer/
 
Helping low-income kids reach grade-level reading proficiency and fall in love with books early:
 
http://readingpartners.org/volunteer/
 
Volunteering at your local library to read to kids, help them with their homework, or tutor adults who want to improve their literacy level:
 
http://www.lapl.org/get-involved/volunteer
 
 
Most of these organizations are LA-based, but a few are nationwide, and there are more like them wherever you happen to be.
 
I chose them for their ability to put reading and writing skills to good use, as this blog is mainly for readers and writers, but there are many other ways of helping groups currently under attack through methods as simple as filing and answering phones.
 
There are options for people who want to dive in headfirst, and options for people who have a couple hours a month to spare, or who prefer to make monetary donations.
 
If you have other suggestions for worthy ways to contribute, feel free to post below.
 
Peace, love, and books, my friends <3


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This. Is. Wrong.

11/9/2016

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What I’m about to say is worth losing Facebook likes over:
 
If you voted for him, you are wrong.
 
There. I said it. And it shouldn’t have been this difficult or taken this long.
 
You may have noticed an uncharacteristic amount of silence from me in the weeks preceding yesterday’s election. That’s in large part because I couldn’t bring myself to carry on talking about coffee and zombies as if the question of whether this country could yet pass a test of basic human decency was not on the table, or as if this question was not important.
 
I also couldn’t bring myself to speak openly about that question itself, because of the standard industry wisdom that a new author should not discuss politics, should not discuss anything that might offend or alienate anyone.
 
The wisdom that while we can write diverse and revolutionary stories in our books (because who’s going to read what’s in a book anyway?), we should not be publicly seen to discuss anything of substance.
 
I accepted that wisdom as a necessary evil, until yesterday, when a man who says whatever vile thing pops into his head – no matter how objectively offensive and wrong – went up against a woman who is polished and politic to a fault, and won the White House.
 
I’m tired of being quiet and polite about everyone else’s opinions while a man who can’t be polite about other people’s basic human rights is lauded and rewarded for “telling it like it is.”
 
He’s wrong. If you support him, you are wrong.
 
I don’t care if that’s impolitic to say. It’s also impolitic to label an entire ethnic group rapists while bragging about your own history of committing sexual assault. And it’s so much more than impolitic. It’s wrong.
 
Yes, everyone has the right to an opinion. Everyone has the right to express that opinion out loud and in writing and, in the case of adults who aren’t convicted felons, with a vote. These are sacred rights that must be protected. Thoughts and information are far too important and powerful for any person or organization to be trusted with controlling and regulating them.
 
Everyone has the right for their opinions to go uncensored. Yes, everyone.
 
This does not mean that those opinions have the right to go uncriticized, or that every opinion is equally valid, or valid at all.
 
Everyone’s vote deserves to be counted. I’m not suggesting (in spite of the unethical and wildly illegal suppression of key voter demographics he’s openly admitted to orchestrating) that he didn’t win enough legitimate votes to be elected, or that those votes shouldn’t be binding.
 
I’m saying, America, you voted wrong.
 
You voted for racism. You voted for sexism. You voted for homophobia and xenophobia and religious intolerance.
 
These things are wrong. I will not take that back. I will not waffle and qualify that remark with placating pleasantries.
 
They. Are. Wrong.
 
These things are the essence of social injustice, of evil itself, of the worst of human history that good people have worked so long and so hard to free us from.
 
And yesterday, this country demonstrated that those good people remain the minority of the population to this day.
 
It’s not that I don’t understand how people fall into the trap of bigotry. I do. When you’re born into an arbitrarily lucky category, it’s tempting as hell to cling to any rationalization for why you deserve your special advantages, and when you’re living a less than charmed life, it’s even more tempting to cling to any rationalization, however arbitrary, for why you belong on top of someone else, anyone else. Power corrupts, and poverty and ignorance turn people on each other.
 
I understand these concepts. I can see the nurture aspect of what turns people into bigoted assholes. I believe that changes to people’s environments can reduce or even eliminate these arbitrary prejudices, and that’s why I will continue to vote and advocate for anything that improves the average person’s living conditions, educational level, and access to communication with other people of diverse backgrounds.
 
It’s why I will continue to create and advocate for art that challenges the long-standing bigotry rationalizations of the straight-white-American-male-centric media, rather than reinforcing them.
 
I want to be a part of creating a future world that respects equality and diversity, and I believe nurture-based changes can do that.
 
But I do not excuse anyone from responsibility for his or her own bigotry.
 
Bigotry is the shameful heritage of every culture and every individual on this earth, and the only way things ever get better is through people standing up, in defiance of whatever prejudice they’ve been taught, and saying, “No. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
 
It is the responsibility of every individual to reject the darkness of the past, and if you were one of those who failed in this responsibility yesterday, it doesn’t only speak to your upbringing. It speaks to your character.
 
And if you are one of those who did your best for justice and equality yesterday, I beg you to join me in seeing this as a wakeup call.
 
We are not safe. Inequality and ignorance will not fix themselves. Good people are desperately needed right now.
 
Do not be quiet because you fear being less “liked,” in any sense of the word.
 
I’m still working out my next moves. I’m currently lucky enough to be able to manage some spare time on top of my full time work creating art brimming with protest and anti-stereotyping. After yesterday, I’m looking to put some of that time toward volunteer work, hopefully helping to get more books into the hands of more kids, in the hope of a more thoughtful, understanding, and enlightened future.
 
Your options for helping will be different from mine, but do something. Something other than joking about running to Canada. Something to help make this country and planet a little better, a little kinder, a little fairer.
 
Today, I’m starting by no longer being too afraid to say something so radical and obvious as this:
 
What happened yesterday is unconscionable. It is indefensible. It is wrong. And we have a lot of work to do to recover from it and keep moving in the direction of what’s right.


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