Be the change you want to see in the world

Meta
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Jake Worth talks about making a friendlier, more humane internet

As a writer, receiving feedback on my work is welcome and rare. This blog gets thousands of readers a month, and yet the amount of direct feedback I’ve received over all the years is a small fraction of that.

I want to hear it! Praise is encouraging. Criticism is often enlightening. If it’s a nitpick or aside, that’s almost always interesting.

A pity then there isn’t a comment section on his blog. If you want people to reach out, make it as easy as possible for them to do so. I might’ve left a comment, but I sure as hell won’t hunt for a link to social media or gods forbid an email address to do the same.

via.

Nightwing: Leaping into the Light — Tom Taylor & Bruno Redondo — #Comicaday (74)

Comix
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Dick Grayson does what internet critics always say Bruce Wayne should do and starts using his new found wealth to fix Blüdhaven.

Cover of Nightwing: Leaping into the Light showing Nightwing moving through an urban landscape

An underappreciated feature of DC’s Compact comics line is that, like manga, you can read them with one hand, leaving the other free to eat your support frex. A more obvious advantage is that you get to sample new writers or artists for the low price of ten books. I bought this because I like Nightwing (I have always been a New Teen Titans fanboy). I hadn’t heard of either Tom Taylor or Bruno Redondo before.

Based on this though I’d like to see more of either. Taylor is a fun writer, able to give Nightwing a sense of humour without it becoming irritating while Redondo has a clean, well flowing art style that in his faces reminds me of Steve Lieber or Kevin Maguire. His fight scenes are assured too and I love the way he draws the city of Blüdhaven, seventies NYC by any other name. It has been a while since I’ve read such an assured, competent superhero story like this. Something that isn’t yet another event tie-in, nor trying to say something profound about what being a superhero is like.

No, this is just a collected slab of Nightwing continuity with all the pluses and minuses this brings with it. Nightwing: Leaping into the Light collects NightwingSuperman: Son of Kal-El 9, also written by Tom Taylor. This collect the start of Taylor and Redondo’s run on Nightwing, on which they stayed until issue 118, a rather respectable run for any creative team these days.

You’ll notice that there’s a three issue gap in the middle of the collection, so it’s not quite a straight forward chronological run. Nor is the plot line in the crossover with Superman: Son of Kal-El resolved; you have to buy that series’ collections if you want to know what happened next. Finally, much as it was easy to get into it, this isn’t quite a clean start: things happened to Nightwing recently that are still refered to, but you really don’t need to know more about them then what Taylor already tells you about them…

Calvin asks why superheroes do not fight more realistic threats, to which Hobbes responds that would be boring. 'Quick, to the batfax!'

What Taylor and Redondo do with Nightwing is basically taking this old Calvimn & Hobbes gag seriously: what if Bruce Wayne/Batman stopped beating up costumed weirdos and put his vast wealth to work making Gotham City better? They do this by making Dick Grayson a billionaire in their very first issue by having him be the heir to Alfred “Batman’s butler” Pennyworth’s wealth. (He also adopts a dog: Haley, aka Bitewing). Having done some soul searching and having come into contact with Blüdhaven;s large unhoused population he decide that this is where he’ll focus his efforts first. When asked why this particular issue, he answers that it will get colder soon.

If based on this you’re expecting a semi-realistic comic about the difficulties setting up a charitable foundation or the like you’ll be disappointed however. Dick Grayson’s plans infuriate the criminal rulers of Blüdhaven and they immediately put a price on his head, the resolution of which is the main plot in this volume, as a series of increasingly dangerous assassins come after him. What I liked about this is that Nightwing doesn’t faces these dangers on his own. Both his team mates in the Titans as well as members of the extended Bat family come over to help him, most noticably one Barbara “Batgirl/Oracle” Gordon, with whom Dick rekindles his long running off and on relationship. I like that sense of a wider world and superhero community, it reminds me of the Bronze Age superhero series I grew up with.

I Am from Bosnia – Take Me to America

Football, Music, video
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If we have to have quick cash grabbing World Cup tie-ins, make them more like this:


Turns out Dubioza Kolektiv is actually a pretty right-on ska/rock band from Bosnia-Herzegovina, active for all sorts of leftwing causes, if we can believe their Wikipedia page. They originally recorded this song under its proper name, U.S.A. for their 2011 album Wild Wild East. Then it was intended as a satirical take on the desire of many Bosnians to, well, migrate to America. But then Bosnia-Herzegovina actually qualified for the World Cup for the first time ever, by beating Italy even and so…



As the report from TRT above shows, there’s a history behind all this that makes both Bosnia’s appearance at the World Cup and this song so poignant. Today they’re playing their first game at the finals, so it feels fitting to post this. That it’s a skanking ska song makes it even better.

Smoking Is Hot — Tayutau Futari — Friday Funnies

Comix, Manga
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Always the sign of a good scanlation group when it bothers to explain things like this on their credits page:

A panel from the first chapter is compared to the painting it is a homage to: Grande Odalisque

Tayutau Futari (translated here as A Couple Drifting in the Wind) is a girls’ love/yuri series with a simple premise: hot woman is hotter if she smokes. That’s certainly what first year college photography student Fujino Kaori thinks when she first meets Momochi. Kaori’s berating her lack of friends and exciting youthful college life when she falls asleep on a bench in the college grounds. When she wakes up it’s because Momochi, or Momo, a tattooed second year art student just back from a year traveling around Japan sits down next to her. It’s not hard to see why Kaori immediately fancies her and wants to take her picture.

Momo lying on a coach, her back turned towards the camera, looking back at us, a cigarette in her hand from which smoke circles up in the air

Handsome, butch and with an unconventional attitude — girls are not supposed to smoke in Japan — Momo looks to be everything Kaori might wish she was as well. By the third chapter they’ve decided to be room mates, by the fifth Mom is comfortable enough around Kaori to walk around naked in their apartment, to the latter’s deligh^wdiscomfort. And in each chapter Puebro (a pseudonym referencing the Pueblo cigarette brand) hides a homage to a famous painting. Sometimes, like the one from chapter one above are easy to recognise as references, some, like the Vermeer one in chapter two, are more hidden. Kudos to Sappho Scans for always recognising and explaining them.

Anime girl wearing a deer stalker and face mask thinking to herself about her crush: As much as it pains me to admit, she really is something else. Compared to her, I'm nothing mor than your run-of-the-mill beautiful genius.

By chapter six things get a bit more complicated as the girl above, Setsuna, aspirant Youtube streamer, joins the cast. Like Kaori she’s infatuated (to the point of stalking) with Momo, but once she learns of her relationship with Kaori she ships them immediately. The second volume of Tayutau Futari opens with ehr introducing herself to Momo and Kaori and it seems some hijinks are imminent, but sadly Sappho Scans stopped their scanlation with chapter eight. Their reason? Seven Seas will release the series in English. That will be in December, so reserve your copies now.