The Culture Channel

Happy Wednesday!

Instead of writing about the actual Nazi-themed comics Marvel is currently putting out, I’m going to summarize/review the imaginary Captain America and/or Avengers-centric titles I wish existed.

So, this week is the second issue of The Falcon and Captain America, which debuted back in July and which so far seems to be about Sam and Redwing going on a cross-country roadtrip with their sidekick Bucky!Cap, supposedly so Sam can re-introduce Bucky to modern/twenty-first century America. The first issue ended with them driving off into the sunrise/sunset together to start their roadtrip. This one opens with them in costume together in a diner somewhere along the NJ Turnpike debating their route (Sam has a bunch of old-school road atlases, Bucky accuses him of having spent too much time with Steve) while a douchey-looking guy with a pro-Trump hat makes some comment to his buddies about how nice it is to see “the real” Captain America back. Bucky makes a comment to him on the way out about how “the real” Captain America would probably have stopped to teach him a lesson and he’s lucky Bucky’s only the understudy and he and Sam get into their little red hybrid and drive away. Then they fight Overdrive, who’s created a giant traffic jam by altering everyone’s cars into goofy-looking nonfunctional models to protest overconsumption of fossil fuel (power-creep alert – he apparently has “turbo-nanites” now that allow him to affect multiple vehicles at once now). Sam and Bucky eventually talk him down* and convince him that there are better ways to fight global warming than through traffic accidents and maaaybe this was a poor way to go about trying to turn himself into a good guy. It ends with them getting back in the Falcon-mobile and continue on their way. There was a brief flashback during the diner scene to Steve angsting at Bucky before they left (about having been brainwashed into thinking he was HYDRA, so now he knows how terrible Bucky must feel about having been The Winter Soldier), but hopefully that’s not going to be a major theme and we’ll mostly stick with Epic Roadtrip Adventures from here on out.

*This is when you find out that Sam’s car is a hybrid.

Next Week:
X-Women #3 (I still think this is a stupidly gimmicky title given that there have been multiple all-female X-men line-ups before and all of those runs had normal X-book titles, and that they should just make it X-Men: Red or something to go with the new Gold and Blue X-books, but it has Jubilee and X-23 in it, so I'm continuing to give it a chance)

As if the Rocket/Groot feels of the movie weren’t enough ship feels for one fandom/segment-of-the-marvel-verse, I have now read Thanos Imperative.

People on my dash/flist who have been reading these comics all along, why didn’t you tell me there was an “If you will permit it”/”I’m glad you’re with me, Sam, here at the end of all things”/Bolivian Army Ending pairing I could have been shipping? (okay, with somebody who doesn’t show up in the movie, but still.)

"And then they died holding hands/fighting off enemies back-to-back" is my shipping kryptonite.

Posting isn’t enabled yet, but the comm itself is here: http://not-brand-event.dreamwidth.org/

I was thinking Wednesday would be a good, traditional day for discussion posts. Would people prefer to read one issue each of all three comics every week, and pretend that’s what’s coming out now and not Original Sins, or have each discussion post be title-specific and for an entire story arc?

… is Rick Remender’s theme song, sung to the tune of the Monitor Lizard’s “I’m gonna eat somebody” song from Fern Gully

I’ve had no access to the internet since going home for Thanksgiving on the 27th. I do not know who Remender killed last Wednesday, and I’m afraid to find out.

I hope it was one of the X-men characters, because they tend to come back from the dead faster and more often. (Maybe it was Rogue, but it will turn out that it was actually Mystique-disguised-as-Rogue and that’s why Remender’s Rogue was always vaguely OOC, and also that Mystique didn’t just fake being Rogue but also faked her death for ‘reasons’ and is really still alive. Preferably ‘reasons’ involving one of her periodic horribly failtastic attempts to actually be some kind of parental figure to Rogue - I love it when Mystique tries to be Rogue’s mom and ends up just being utterly creepy and invasive and horrible but in a totally well-meaning way.)

There's going to be a SHIELD tv show, produced/directed by Joss Whedon, and guess who's headlining it?

( Spoilers )

So, I've heard some good and enthusiastic things about Mark Waid's Daredevil run from my flist, but after reading further, I'm not sure about whether to pick the title up or not.

I was all excited at the idea of being able to back to having my delicious Matt Murdock angst unaccompanied by dead and/or crazy female characters (i.e. what made me quit reading it partway through Brubaker's run), but it sounds like Waid is going back to a completely pre-Frank Miller take on the character, and I'm not sure I'm a fan of Matt getting retconned into having all of his vaguely depressive and vaguely bipolar qualities taken away, if that is indeed what's happening.  Like with Tony, Matt's struggles with mental illness (a lot of the storylines he's had since <i>Man Without Fear</i> can be read that way even if the writers didn't specifically intend it, especially <i>Born Again</i> ) were one of the things I always liked about the character.

He's still got the same personality, right?  Just a somewhat more emotionally stable version of it?  All the stuff he's struggled with hasn't just been erased out and ignored, has it?

I trust Waid a lot more than I do some other comics writers *cough*Fraction*cough* but all the DCnU stuff with characters I like getting half the things I liked about them taken away (those that haven't been erased from existence entirely) has made me paranoid.

(Also, wasn't T'Challa being Daredevil while Matt had a nervous breakdown that involved temporarily going evil and then running away to travel around somewhere or other?  Has he gone back to Wakanda?  And are the issues where he's Daredevil any good?  Or at least not utterly terrible and with no dead women and some Foggy Nelson content, which is probably all it would take to get me to read them?)

Apparently, someone named Robert G. Weiner has published a book entitled Captain America and the struggle of the superhero: critical essays.

Look what's included in a list of citations for online fanfiction.

Amusingly, it's just about the one purely gen ficlet featuring Steve that I've ever written, despite several of the other cited fics by other people being slash.

All the citations appear to come from the old marvelfanfiction archive, and there are several LJ comics fandom people included in the list. caia_comica is featured prominently, and so is harmonyangel, under a different penname.*


*only the pennames people used on the marvelfanfiction archive are listed, FYI, no real names or other info.

The War Machine armor in the new Iron Man 2 movie poster is quite possibly one of the sexiest things I've ever seen.

Seriously, I thought the Granov-inspired design for Tony's armor was hot, but Rhodey's armor is even better -- it manages to simultaneously be very close to the original War Machine design and to blend perfectly with the aesthetic of Tony's Granov!armor.

It may possibly be sexy enough to overcome my annoyance at Terrance Howard being replaced as Rhodey, but I'm reserving judgement (and that casting inconsistancey would be seriously weird if you were a movieverse Tony/Rhodey shipper, I imagine).

Also, the poster is hilariously slashy, even to my Steve/Tony OTP eyes, to the point that it comes near to equalling the infamous Brokeback-style pictures of Steve and Tony that showed up on all those Civil War covers and double-page spreads and things. If someone hasn't already made it into a Tony/Rhodey icon, they should.

Title: Zero at the Bone
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: None (fic is either gen or pre-slash, whichever you prefer)
Warnings: None that I know of, beyond some minor violence and Rorschach's issues. And the fact that "Zero at the Bone" is a really pretentious title.
Author's note: Written for the Watchmen kink meme, for the prompt "Rorschach feeding Dan sugar cubes in a h/c situation." This is set pre-GN and pre-Roche. They're both still pretty young here, under 30.

Thank you to kijikun, without whose efforts Rorschach's name would have been spelled wrong about 60% of the time.

( It was bitterly cold tonight, the wind off the river so far below freezing that it made his face hurt even through the mask )

More of the AU I'm not writing. Because it has been eating at my brain and I can't help myself. (Note: narrator's opinions vis-à-vis Mary Winchester are definitely not reflective of mine. I'ma go read Wonder Woman pr0n now to scrub the misogyny out of my brain) Also, there is reckless screwing with both SPN and Watchmen timelines.


( November, 1969, a Comedian is killed in Vietnam )