Stuff I Read: “Bear Nuts” by Alison Acton

Remember the Care Bears?  Cute cuddly (sickly sweet) bears with symbols on their tummies which indicated their temperament and role?  Cheer Bear, Friend Bear, Grumpy Bear, and so on?

(C’mon, admit it.  You remember them.  You just wish you didn’t!  You also remember Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony.)

Alison Acton’s comic Bear Nuts asks the question: “What other iconic bears were out there which we never saw on the cartoon?  The ones with less (market-to-)kid-friendly personalities?”

The “About” page for the comic glosses over this origin, saying just “As one of the largest exhibits at the Discount Zoo, (in both size and number of inhabitants) the bears attract a lot of attention… something none of them are happy about.  Between gawking adults, jeering children, and their own rather profound personality clashes, it’s a wonder the bears can get through each day without maiming each other… well, most days.”

With characters like Gay (with a lavender rhino, a barely known gay symbol), Evil (with an inverted pentagram), Prozac (with a pill), Tanked, Death, Nerd, and Vanity all sharing the same exhibit at the zoo, Acton has the makings of a fun, emotional, explosive story.  Currently posting a couple times a week, Bear Nuts is a perfect blend of cute and twisted.

Two collected volumes, plus prints, sketches, original art, and merchandise are available from the website and from Acton’s partner companies.  (I want a Gay Bear t-shirt!  One of those “sports” design shirts with a white chest and light yellow sleeves and collar, and a pic of Gay on the tummy as though I were “Gay Bear” Bear would be way cool.  Bet Evil would sell even better.)
 

Stuff I Read: “Bleeding Cool”

For years, UK-based Rich Johnston’s “Lying in the Gutters&rdquos; column was the place to go to for advance news and rumors about the comic book industry.  He had an incredible hit rate for getting stuff right — which probably implies that lots of people were willing to feed stuff to him, that they trusted him.

About a year ago, “Lying in the Gutters” was transformed from a weekly column into the comics and comics-related film news (and rumor) site Bleeding Cool.

While other comics fan sites run lots of previews of soon-to-be-on-sale comics, interviews with creators, press release lightly rewritten as news stories, and fan musings on various subjects, Bleeding Cool remains the go-to place for all the latest stuff.  As an example, the current front page has bits on:

• Sponge Bob comics
• A new Transformer named "Spastic"
• Ads for The Walking Dead
• A Roy Lichtenstein painting auction
• J. Michael Straczinski
• A new Winnie the Pooh movie
• Torchwood and Dr. Who
• The Little Fockers movie
• Casting for the new Spider-Man movie
• Ghost Rider 2
• …and a lot more

Lots of rumors.  Lots of barely-there, bleeding-edge news.  Lots of trailers and such that don’t show up on other comics sites.

Not just cool.  Bleeding Cool.
 

Stuff I Read: A Distant Soil, by Colleen Doran

A Distant Soil is a long-running sci-fi/fantasy comic book by Colleen Doran.

Started when she was a teenager back in the 1980s and restarted from the beginning a couple times since then, A Distant Soil features a pair of teenage kids — Jason and Liana — who have been drugged up and locked in an asylum/test lab/government facility for several years due to their psychic powers.  During one flare-up, Liana’s powers contact an alien race called the Ovanon, causing a race between various political factions of their upper class (the Hierarchy) to catch and control (or maybe kill) the kids.

One of those factions is connected to an underground rebellion which seeks to overthrow the power structure of the Hierarchy and depose the ruling Avatar.  Their representative gathers Liana — who turns out to be the child of an Ovanon exile — and a crew of other humans (and some non-humans, including another Ovanon exile and the time-displaced Arthurian knight Galahad!), intending to use them to bolster the rebellion.  What neither the rebellion nor the humans realize is that the rebellion’s representative is… but that would be telling.

What makes A Distant Soil so compelling beyond the story and the layered characterizations (and those would be enough!), though, is Doran’s art.  Steeped in both the best richness of classic Japanese manga (take note: I don’t mean the “speed lines and huge weepy eyes” stuff people tend to associate with the term “manga”) and flowy fashion-heavy illustration along the lines of Erté and Aubrey Beardsley, Doran’s art in this comic is fine lined, expressive, detailed, deep, and heck, the word for it is “beautiful”.

A number of comic books featuring grand themes, vast world building, and novelistic scope premiered in the 1980s and 1990s — A Distant Soil, Elfquest, Bone, Strangers in Paradise, and others.  While forced by the nature of the comics industry to release their stories in roughly 20-page increments — and those are sometimes released months apart due to what underfunded small press/self-publishing companies can manage — these stories have tended to read best in large chunks, in the trade paperback collected forms, where you can sit down to 150 to 300 pages at once and read it not unlike a text novel.  In that form, the themes and foreshadowing and repeated elements come through as they were intended.  As you can imagine, that intent gets muddy and lost when you read only 20 pages, only twice a year.

Today in the world of the web, Doran is presenting the comic again, usually a page every couple days.  This is almost as good a way of consuming the comic as in book form, where even if you are all caught up and reading the pages just one at a time as they are released, the recent pieces of the story are still fresh in your mind.  (But I still heartily recommend them in book form, too: more permanent and the best possible reading experience.)

I think Doran is just about caught up to the last printed issue (I’m still a few months behind in reading, a few pages at a shot, a couple times a week), and there are supposed to only be a few issues to go before the story is done.  Not that the rich universe she has built couldn’t provide her with a hundred new stories to tell.  I hope she tackles some of them!
 

Stuff I Read: “The Daily Dish” (Andrew Sullivan’s blog)

For a while now, I’ve wanted to highlight some of the blogs and websites and webcomics that I read, both to examine for myself what I get out of them and maybe turn a few other people on to them.

This week is the 10th Anniversary of Andrew Sullivan’s blog, “The Daily Dish”.  You can read his biography here, but in summary, Sullivan is a well know gay conservative writer, notable in his writing for several books looking at homosexuality from a positive-but-conservative viewpoint, especially Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con.  On the blogging front, he started out quite pro-Bush and has drifted more moderate over the years as revelation after revelation about the directions of the the Republican party have come out.  (Or perhaps he didn’t drift, everything else did in the opposite direction.)  And don’t get him started about Sarah Palin.

Years ago, my father taught me that the best way to beat something was to understand it, and the best way to understand it was to pay attention to it.  As an example, he was on the board of Planned Parenthood and he was a member of the Christian Coalition (I imagine they were really pleased that he was a minister); as such, he got access to huge doses of everything the theocratic right was up to, practically by the shovelful.

I’ve put that policy into effect in my own life over the years, listening to Dr. Laura and Michael Savage and Michael Medved and Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin on the radio — often shaking my head at stuff I couldn’t quite believe I was hearing.  It’s been especially interesting to listen to conservative talk radio in Seattle over the years as they’ve moved through these people one at a time, eventually kicking each to the curb and moving on to the next voice.  And where convenient, I at least open my ears to other sources of information and opinion, just to see what’s up on the other side of the fence, to see what the “easy” channels of information are not telling me.

(Really, it sometimes surprises me how much people — especially ostensibly liberal queers and techies — like to live in their own little bubbles.  They say they want to be up on politics and current events, but no, really they don’t.  Just like people addicted to Fox News, they want to get their news only from narrow, supportive avenues, ones which will feed them more of what they want to hear and nothing to challenge their world views.  If you try to balance their viewpoints, they will often fight to death to keep from learning stuff which will imbalance them.)

I initially started reading Sullivan’s blog (back in about 2002, I think) for much the same reason — to see what these “gay conservatives” were up to.  Initially, as a good fag living in a very blue city (Seattle), I was repelled by much of the pro-Bush content and such, but I muscled through.  (And “muscled through” is right: The Daily Dish has many screenfuls of content on its front page, and sometimes will fill more than one front page in a day [although less so today than in years past], so it takes a dedicated block of time to consume it.  Sullivan [and his assitants/substitutes] isn’t quick reading.)

Over time, well, the abyss gazes back: even as Sullivan’s tune shifted some, so did mine toward him and his blog.  Being confronted by opinions on the other side of the fence — opinions which are generally well written and well rounded, as opposed to the shrill name calling from talk radio — expanded my views.  Not necessarily changed my views; expanded them.  (It’s interesting to go back and revisit my blog posts from 6 and 7 years ago.  Can I see some influence from Sullivan in there?  Maybe.)  I agree with some things I read, and disagree with others, but most of all, I can’t help but respect Sullivan.

And that’s probably really all he asks for.