Fangirl Thursdays

I finally removed When Fangirls Attack off my feed and blogroll. I have nothing against people who visit it, and I think if you find it useful or entertaining you should continue to do so. I've been at the receiving end of pretty inexplicably nasty and bitter comments by one half of that team for some time now, and I see no reason to continue to support them. I used to justify keeping them on the blogroll, long past the time when I visited the site on a regular basis, out of the feeling like "well, they're doing this great service for women in comics, and well heck that makes it all okay." But, I think the fact of them being female and writing (or rather, linking to) female topics is not enough for me, based on some sense of "gender unity," to overlook their pettiness.

Perhaps it's my support of their occasional critic Dirk Deppey that soured them; to which I say that, despite the fact that Dirk has disagreed with some of my opinions (and has even been quite snarky with me on occasion), he has never addressed me with the sort of personal attacks that I have experienced from Ragnell at WFA. With Dirk, it's just commentary and different points of view. With Ragnell, there seems to be this bitter and bitchy edge that has finally made me decide to keep WFA at arm's length.

I stopped reading WFA a while ago, around the time I discovered Journalista existed. Between Journalista, JK Parkin's & Kevin Melrose's work on Blog@Newsarama, Tom Spurgeon's news round-ups, and the occasional Beat update, I'm pretty set for my comics news for the day. (though just to clarify, I do read a variety of blogs for commentary & reviews. I also read Comic Mix, but more for the columns).

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As for Kevin Church's bizarre and adamant objections to, of all things, a post on search engine optimization (as if two posts on that subject cannot exist at the same time or teh internets blow up), I am content to believe this is his version of an Andy Kaufman routine, and leave it at that.

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The Spoiler Train:

RE: Last page of Captain America #36 --D'oh! D'oh! D'oh! D'oh! Do'h! D'oh D'oh! D'oh!
However, since it's Ed Brubaker, I'm sure he has some twist on the whole thing that will exceed expectations and make it worthwhile.

RE: Last page of Avengers: The Initiative #10 --I know at least one really happy camper who jazzed off that reveal :-)
Now, can we have this New Old New Warriors team go up against that New New Warriors team and clean house?

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You know who wins from having Bendis on both Avengers books? Dan Slott.

I know so many readers who don't follow the Bendis Avengers but will read The Initiative.

I know a bunch of readers who don't even follow Marvel's superhero comics but follow The Initiative.

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The upcoming Speed Racer movie is either going to be really really awesome or extremely sucky. It's tricky, because on one hand it's the Wachowski Brothers, so there is that expectation. On the other hand, it seems, by viewing the trailer, rather high-concept -- and high-concept, I have found, either goes really really awesome or really really terrible. Whereas sheer mediocrity, as in the case with the Scooby Doo or Garfield film outings, will almost guarantee you a two-picture deal.

Also saw the Hulk movie trailer. Loved everything up to that gloppy Abomination. The big fight scene between Hulk & Abomination at the end of the trailer looked kinda cartoony. I've heard they still have F/X to put into the final film, so maybe it will look better. If not, it's all sort of resting on Edward Norton's shoulders. I'm sorry, every time I see him in the trailer talking about how he has this other personality, I think Fight Club. A YouTube video mash-up between the two seems inevitable.

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This flyer for a Christian church, found on Scans Daily, takes a page from comix (and Frank Miller?), I believe...
You know, I remember when we got that cover for "Dark Knight 2" in the office. Somebody remarked that it was like Frank Miller plunked his hand down on the bristol board, traced it, and picked up his check. Some of us were pretty disappointed; and as you can imagine, that was only the beginning. (though the stack of concept drawings he did at the beginning were really nice)