A's Fandom Journal

I've written reviews of #1 here and #2 here (second post at that link) and now I'm doing a post with scans!

Sigil is a four-issue limited series, the second of two CrossGen titles (the other being Ruse) to be recently revitalized by Marvel. Since the fourth issue just came out last week, I figured this was as good a time as any to do a post about it. The trade - called Out of Time - comes out in September.

I think there's a fair amount about it that makes it interesting, including the facts that the protagonist is an interesting teenage girl, that it passes the Bechdel test at some points, and that there are pirates (including an awesome lady captain) involved.

What brought it to my attention, however, were two of the names on the cover (by Jelena Djurdjevic) of the first issue - Mike Carey and Leonard Kirk. As a fan of both Carey's work on The Unwritten and Kirk's work on the first Agents of Atlas miniseries, the idea of a collaboration between the two had instant appeal for me. As I found out later, the storyline and art (including some really nice colouring by Guru eFX) would justify my interest.

13 scans from two issues - 7 from #1 (22 pages) and 6 from #2 (20 pages). The images are different sizes because some are taken from previews and some are my own scans.

Note: There are scenes of grieving (a funeral; in the second set of scans) and scenes of bullying (in both sets of scans).

( Sigil #1: In which we meet our heroine )


( Sigil #2: In which Captain Sin is awesome )

Part two coming soon!

20 icons of Ensign Hoshi Sato, Communications Officer of the starship Enterprise NX-01, from the TV show Star Trek: Enterprise.

Made for Round 23 of the contest at startrek20in20.

Examples:


( Breaking a Vulcan encryption code would be easier than this )

Please don't take your backing musicians - your regular pianist and the backing band and/or orchestra that appear whenever you need more instrumental accompaniment than what Puck or Sam or Finn can do with guitars and/or drums - for granted. They're more than "just furniture"*. They shouldn't be invisible (they're certainly not inaudible!) and they should count.

Be proud of all your musicians. All of them. A little appreciation for the various "band geeks" and "orchestra geeks" can't hurt.

I'm speaking as a person who has been both a choir (although not a show choir) and concert band member - at the same time - while in high school. While the music departments at my schools never faced the difficulties McKinley's does (thank goodness we never had a Sue Sylvester!), I think this is a fairly important issue.

Thank you.

Note to the producers:
Yes this is a show about the kids of the show choir, but you could at least make what references you make to the other musicians at McKinley a little less flippant, you know? I'm not sure if they all have to travel to competition together or if the competition venue provides its own accompanists, but you know what? If a theme of the show really is "the power of music to bring people together", then it'd be nice to be appreciative of the instrumentalists as well.

* ( Slight spoiler for 'Rumours' )

Sigil #2 (of 4) - Mike Carey (story), Leonard Kirk (pencils, pages 1-15 & 20), Patrick Olliffe (pencils, pages 16-19), Ed Tadeo (inks), Guru EFX (colours), and Rob Steen (letters). The cover is by Jelena Djurdjevic.

( Spoilery summary ahead as this issue kicks off with a lot of action )

My thoughts:
This is a good issue! Things continue to get interesting. There's good world-building and we learn a bit more about how "magic" (for lack of a better term) works in this universe.

Sam now has an important, if still somewhat cryptic, "mission" and at least some of the things she needs to work on it...but she still has the school bullies to deal with as well. She's also slowly growing in confidence, both concerning the magical elements of her story and with her enemies at school. We're also shown another glimpse of her non-school non-Sigil-related life through a flashback.

I like that this comic is still passing the Bechdel test and that it does a somewhat better job in this issue than in the last one. In this issue, not only do Sam and Captain Sin (who is the definition of kick-ass) have a brief conversation about survival in difficult situations, but it's evident that Sam really takes the Captain's words to heart. As she gathers her courage for the task ahead (just before the "To be continued" on the last page), she repeats something that the Captain told her earlier for (as I read it) strength and comfort.

I still like the art (seriously can't go wrong with Leonard Kirk pencils!) and I feel I should once again point out the great colouring. Patrick Olliffe also draws some of the pages and his work fits nicely in with Kirk's so that the reader isn't drawn out of the drama of the story. Upon closer study one can see the differences, but they aren't big enough to attract my attention in a negative way.

Overall? Good writing, good art = ficticons keeps reading (if she can still find the money for comics, but that's another subject :P).

This is from finch's set of questions

( Questions 1-13 )

13. Do you have any unique interests on your user profile? What are they? How'd they get there?
:P Yes I do! They are "cassandra lang", "james buchanan "bucky" barnes", "mythquest" and "star wars: x-wing (novels and comics!)".

The first two and the last one are probably there because of the way I've listed them as interests.

( Further 'analysis' ).

MythQuest, though. My beautiful, beloved MythQuest. That is truly a unique thing!

It's a Canadian TV series that aired in 2001 for 13 episodes and ended on the biggest unresolved storyline/cliffhanger EVER (IMO). There are no DVDs, even though there are young-reader adaptations of the first four episodes. But it's being posted on YouTube (freakin' FINALLY!) so now I have a place to send people when I rec it.

The story is about two teens, Alex and Cleo Bellows (played by Christopher Jacot (♥) and Meredith Henderson), whose father Matt (Joseph Kell) goes missing. The culprit? A little-known trickster god, Gorgos, who traps Matt inside a computer-based "CyberMuseum" that he'd been developing. Alex and Cleo accidentally discover that they, too, can enter the CyberMuseum - and various world myths - if they touch artefacts on the CyberMuseum's screen. Once they realize they've found a way to get in and out, their goal becomes to find their father and bring him home with them.

( Check out a trailer for the series! )

14. Did you have a gateway fandom? Still in it? Why or why not? Is there a community for it on DW?
If 'gateway fandom' means one that led a person to online fandom, then mine is either Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. The first fics read and authors I really followed on ff.net wrote in both those fandoms.

I'm still in both of them, yeah, but not as heavily as I was before. I still participate in particular comms related to them over on LJ, but I interact with them via my personal journal because my involvement is from a few years ago, when I wanted to do some fandomy stuff but wasn't sure I wanted or needed a entire separate fandom *journal* yet. Nowadays, fannish things are what this journal and ficticons are both for.

I'm not actually sure if they have comms on DW! Worth a look-see, though. Hmm.

15. What's your current obsession? What about it captures your imagination?
Hmm, let's see. The TV series Camelot (from Starz) probably qualifies because I watch each episode soon (read: a few days) after they air. I like it because it is (to me) an interesting new Arthurian adaptation. The actor Peter Mooney, who plays Arthur's foster-brother Kay, is a particular draw. Kay is a great character and I love Peter Mooney's portrayal of him. The actor himself seems really sweet too, from what I can tell from interviews et al. Another male draw is the actor Philip Winchester and the original character he plays, Leontes, both of whom are interesting too.

And the cast has stunning women! Eva Green rocks as Morgan, Arthur's half-sister; Claire Forlani is sterling as Igraine, Arthur's birth mother; Tamsin Edgerton makes a fab Guinevere; and Chipo Chung, Sinead Cusack, and Lara Jean Chorostecki are great as recurring supporting characters Vivien, Sybil, and Bridget respectively.

The other is the Australian drama Sea Patrol. It's about life on a fictional Royal Australian Navy patrol boat, the HMAS Hammersley, and features some big-name Australian talent as well as some newer faces. Season five, SP's last, is on now.

I guess what attracted me to the show was the uniqueness of perspective it offered. I've watched and enjoyed the military-focused JAG, and the naval-themed-in-some-ways Star Trek, so I guess once I saw some SP and discovered I liked the characters, I was hooked.

This show also has and has had some fabulous women in it. Currently the regulars are Lisa McCune as Kate McGregor, the Hammersley's executive officer/second-in-command; Danielle Horvat as Jessica Bird, currently the ship's chef and second medic after starting as a young gap-year seaman; and Tammy McIntosh as Maxine White, head of the fictional NavCom (the organization that Hammersley's crew report to). Past female stars have included Saskia Burmeister as Nikki Caetano, ship's navigator, and Kirsty Lee Allan as Bomber Brown, ship's chef and second medic.

( the other questions )

I've been meaning for a while now to say that this is finch's set of questions

( Questions 1-6 )

10. Tell me about your default icon.
:D At the moment, it's a textless image of Karl Urban blowing on a pair of (sun?)glasses on a sort of faded pink background. It was made by umbrellas_can and I think it's sexy :D. Plus Karl Urban is just great anyway!



11. What features do you think Dreamwidth should have that it doesn't currently?
Mmm, perhaps an image-hosting feature so I don't have to depend so heavily on my LJ scrapbook. But it's not too much of a hassle and DW *has* been brilliant in terms of everything else that I've needed, so not having this feature doesn't really trouble me.

12. What do you consider the five most "telling" interests from the list on your profile? Why?
Ooh, good question. I'll get back to this question later, because it'll probably take a bit of thinking.

( the other questions )

( Questions 1-3 )

4. What do you do online when you're not on DW?
Well, when I turn on my computer in the mornings I usually check a couple of bookmarked sites for updates. Then (or concurrently, depending on pure chance) I check my email, sometimes following that with a look at Facebook.

Other times (when I'm just browsing/wasting time (which one it is is situation-dependent, of course), I read the various filters on my LJ flist, watch videos on YouTube or other places (usually looking for a particular show or clip, though), check particular fansites for two shows that I like (Sea Patrol [http://v2.sea-patrol.com] and Camelot [http://www.about-camelot.com]) to see if they've been updated, and check the tumblrs that I follow (usually every evening; I do this despite not having a tumblr myself).

And that's all I can think of for the moment.

5. How about when you're not on the computer?
If I'm not in the office then I'm probably watching TV, trying to figure out what to do with my room (it goes from 'clean' to 'WTF wait where did all this junk come from?' in an almost cyclical pattern), or reading. This is of course in addition to meals and sleep.

6. What do you wish people who read your journal knew about you?
The first thing that comes to mind is that while I'm willing to discuss fannish things, I'm very private about RL things. If I do say anything about RL stuff, it's probably going to be very general or very vaguely worded.

Apart from that there's really nothing. I think most of what I want people to know is on my profile page either here or at ficticons.

( the other questions )

1. Why did you sign up for Dreamwidth?
Honestly? To follow scans_daily. I'd started following them on LJ, went with them to IJ briefly, and now I'm here.

( Read more... )

2. Why did you choose your journal name?
This journal has the same name as my fandom journal on LJ - ficticons. It's an amalgam of 'fiction' and 'icons' - the two main things that I wanted that journal - and now this one - for.

3. Do you crosspost? Why or why not?
Sometimes. Looking at my crossposts to LJ, I see that the last time I did it was in August last year. I guess what I wanted was to have the content that I originally posted here more easily accessible to me when I was logged in to LJ (which probably means it was before I changed my settings so that I'm always logged on to DW on my PC). I do have an icon post that is worded exactly the same both here and on LJ, though - I guess I forgot to add the crosspost tag from here, or I posted there first and here later.

( the other questions )

First icon post to this journal!

*\0/*

I've got another one already in the works and ideas for others, but for the moment here are 23 icons of James "Jimmy" Woo, the awesome young Chinese-American head of the mysterious Atlas Foundation and the leader of the superhero team known (only to us, not in-(Marvel)-universe AFAIK) as the Agents of Atlas.

Made for the notgreenorblue challenge using the prompt "Jimmy Woo - Attitude".

A few points:
- The icons are free for the taking.
- Please credit me if you take/use any. Comments (including concrit) would be much appreciated but are not needed.
- The textless icons here may not be used as bases.



( That's the Jimmy Woo I remember )

For blackruzsa on scans_daily, who requested any of a series of moments mentioned in an article entitled "The Balut in a Superhero's Underpants".

It says that "[i]f the Americans have their Easter Eggs, we Filipinos have our Balut Eggs. (Okay, I just made up that term, but it seems appropriate anyway.) Balut Eggs are those moments when Filipinos (or something Pinoy) suddenly pops up in foreign movies, TV shows, novels, and comic books."

It goes on to list several of those moments that appear in American comic books. I was intrigued by one of them - in Marvel Comics’ “Agents of Atlas,” Mt. Pinatubo erupts again and Sentry flies in just in time to rescue a damaged Phivolcs helicopter - so I went to do a little digging and to my surprise, I found I had it.

( Three and approximately 3/4ths scans from Dark Reign Agents of Atlas #1 )