Hello. I'm currently trying to set up RSS on this site, which has a prerequisite of needing to have posts to work with RSS on this site. So I'm going to talk about some comics for a bit.
Runaways (2017, Rowell/Anka/Wilson)
I read this...god, like years and years ago now? Which is weird. But honestly there's two comics that I read that I got into in odd ways, or the same odd way, and that's linked to my experience of them pretty significantly. So maybe this is a false start. We'll come back to this: for now, let's talk about
Fanfiction
I like fanfiction. I read a fair bit of it: less than I used to, which I think is good as I become more of a real person and gain more of an appreciation for short-form art and stories that have a specific end point. I love a story that goes on, but I love a story that ends more.
Back in high school, I was reading a lot of fanfiction: truly huge amounts, to be frank, or at least they were huge to me. It was easily accessible, both via the physical process of reaching it and via the tropes found within. Except there was a problem, which was that I wasn't particularly into any one piece of popular media (popular in the sense of "frequently having fanfiction written about it") enough to have a deep well of fanfiction to draw from and read.
So I leant on the tropes. Archive of our Own features an extremely robust site search option, letting you filter in and out tags, warnings, relationships, fandoms, and the like, but I instead opted for a simpler choice: to type into the search bar "superhero f/f", and read whatever I found. Which was a lot.
There are a couple of types of people who read fanfiction, at least on this specific axis: there are those who read exclusively fanfiction of media they are already familiar with (in my experience, the majority of people reading fanfiction)...and then there's people who don't, like me.
The thing is, accounts on AO3 have publicly visible bookmarks, meaning if you find a work you enjoy, after you finish it you can not only check out what else the author has written, but also see what else they like to read. Take a little peek at it. This leads to reading other authors, and hey, maybe the dynamic between these two characters is cool, and I can search by that, too, and this is how I've read hundreds of thousands of words of My Hero Academia fanfiction without ever having read a page of the manga or seen a minute of the show.
But I'm not here to talk about My Hero Academia, because I don't think I'd actually like the show all that much overall. I'm here to talk about comics: that is, American superhero comics, because I found a few of those and was intrigued enough to go out and get some real, physical comics, with pictures in them, from the library.
Okay, now we can talk.
Runaways (2017, Rowell/Genolet/Cuniffe)
was the first of these. I read an issue or two, loved the heck out of its bold shapes and colors and complicated characters, and then felt like I was missing a whole lot of context. So I looked up the Runaways as characters, discovered they'd been around since 2003 - hey, in comics terms, not too bad! - and requested that book instead. So. We'll come back to this again, much later.
Runaways (2003, Vaughan/Alphona)
is an okay comic book. It's good. It is, actually, quite good - good enough that fourteen-year-old me was excited enough that I got my mother to read it, too, and also my brother and my father and anyone else who would give me the time of day about it, despite the comics featuring some art that I look back on and give a solid enhh. Runaways - in its initial run - is a very strong comic book.
Is it perfect? No - again, there's the art, it's very 2003 in some respects, and some of the setup feels extremely goofy - but it is set up, and then followed through with, which in mainstream superhero comics is a weirdly tall order. The initial run is pretty great.
Of course, it did keep going.
Runaways...after that
There are many things to like here: the introduction of new characters Victor and Xavin, who despite being respectively a robot and a space alien, are very human teenage characters, for example. The initial few story arcs are pretty strong. And perhaps I'm coming down too heavily here, because in fairness it has been a long time since I read this particular series. But there are a couple problems, including
Joss Whedon wrote for some of it
which at the time reportedly everyone was excited about. Unfortunately, looking back on it, the problems are very clear. Xavin's genderfluidity is hamfistedly flattened into a shapeshifter with a totally binary gender, you guys, Xavin's really a girl; there are some attempted one-off romantic subplots that just really do not work; the new character, Klara, is a sweetie but is introduced via a plotline about child marriage that comes off as simultaneously weirdly self-congratulatory to the present and unexpectedly grim. Nothing seems to pan out as well as the initial run did, especially in the last volume, which ends with a cliffhanger in a failed attempt to garner more readership. Reportedly the story concludes in a different character's series, but I was unable to locate those issues, so really who can say? It's the curse of comics again: everything is just too continuous, too spread out, too many issues over too many series.
Speaking of.
Have you heard the good word of Murderworld? (Avengers Arena, 2012)
murderworld is bad. don't read murderworld.
Look, fine, I'm biased, I don't like slashers, and I don't like arbitrary and meaningless death and angst. Murderworld is so much of that and it suuuuuucks dude it sucks so bad. This is a comic built in a lab to make me depressed, and it worked, and it sucked. I read it because it has Nico and Chase, two characters from Runaways (both of whom I quite like!!) but the reading experience was miserable, even though Nico gets a cool ghost hand and has a stellar moment over the course of two pages in the middle somewhere. Also throw in some classically terrible DID rep and wanton murder (world!), and it's just...this is so not what I come to comics for. I remember enjoying the followup, Avengers Undercover, significantly (SIGNIFICANTLY) more, but I don't know if it's worth it. This is the one thing on this list I never want to come back to, really.
A-Force (2015 and especially 2016 (Thompson & Caldwell))
ON THE OTHER HAND A-FORCE IS GREAT
Look, at this point we're only tangentially related to Runaways, but I wanted to be all caught up on everything that happened before I finally got back to the then-new comics, and no one but Nico was showing up consistently in any comics hereabouts, so I just went with this. On the opposite end of the spectrum from Avengers Arena, A-Force is colorful, hopeful, and bright, while still able to have an emotional core. It is great, it is brilliant, it is criminally undervalued and it is one of my favorite teams. Admittedly it initially starts in the Secret Wars canon (big all-Marvel crossover event, don't ask) and then after only a short while of a regular run, it runs smack bang into the bigass Civil War II storyline that was running through Marvel at the time. Every Civil War storyline sucks and ruins all the comics that it runs into. I've read a lot of them at this point and none of them are fun or good. I know they sell bajillions of comics but consistently the good comics are the ones that are not the huge crossover ones and Civil War II is FAR from an exception - but before it runs into Civil War II and is subsequently cancelled, A-Force is fuckin great, even including the much less strong "Volume 0" (Secret Wars).
WHICH FINALLY BRINGS US TO
Runaways (2017, Rowell/Anka/Genolet/Wilson/Cuniffe)
Look. It's just a real good comic.
That's about it, I've basically run out of things to say. It's gorgeous: Kris Anka & Andres Genolét kill it in every single panel, and colorists Dee Cuniffe and Matthew Wilson murder it on every single page. The characters, the art, and the writing are all such beautiful representations of a bunch of late-teens trying very, very hard, and sometimes managing to succeed. Which, hey, was very important to me when I was a late-teen trying very hard and sometimes managing to succeed. Good fucking book!!! I need to reread all of it!!
ok thanks thats all i got byeee